October 12 - December 8, 2023
From Houston Christian University:
“David Olivant’s new series of mixed media works on paper are called Retroglyphs. They invite their viewers to adopt the mindset of the archeologist who sifts through diverse iconographic clues to recover a forgotten and possibly repressed nar ative pertaining to the loss of hope and a fall from grace. Each and all seem like fragmentary scenes salvaged and reconstructed from the remnants of bygone circumstances that both reveal and conceal a kind of coming to consciousness, presented in compressed layers of pictorial activity that are provisionally sutured together to recreate something resembling a crime scene. We are left unsure as to whether or not something bad has happened, or is about to happen, but either way, a human dilemma is revealed.
The material program of Olivant’s Retroglyphs invites us to use the descriptive term palimpsest, which means layered accumulation of incidents manifesting over time, but it can also refer to a peeling back of those layers for the sake of parsing their specifics, oftentimes revealing an uncanny reemergence of repressed memories and associations, whether they be of a personal or historical nature. It slowly dawns on the viewer that the what of these works and the how they are made both mirror and editorialize on each other, all the while bearing witness to the consequences of a social world on the verge of amusing itself to death, struggling to fully apprehend the consequences of its translation of myopia into zeitgeist.
— Mark Van Proyen”
Reception: October 12, 2023 | 4–7 pm
Houston Christian University Contemporary Art Gallery, University Academic Center, Building 18
7502 Fondren Road
Houston, 77074 Texas
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