David Olivant
Whether or Not Something Bad Has Happened
August 4 - September 1, 2023
Reception: Friday, August 4, 5-8pm
Strata Gallery presents “David Olivant: Whether or Not Something Bad Has Happened”. The exhibition opens August 4th with a special reception on August 4th from 5:00pm - 8:00pm. This inaugrual exhibition will take place at Strata Gallery’s NEW location, in the historic plaza district at 125 Lincoln Ave, Suite 105.
Those seeking comfort, reassurance, escape, or the products of any current curatorial agendas are advised to avoid this exhibition of Olivant’s Retroglyphs. As the Bay area critic, Mark Van Proyen suggested in a recent catalog essay on the artist’s works - “They invite their viewers to adopt the mindset of the archeologist who sifts through diverse iconographic clues to recover a forgotten and possibly repressed narrative 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…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.”
These mixed media paintings appropriated and digitally derived from the artist’s earlier assemblages (Heteroglyphs), insidiously undermine any sense of certainty and for the patient, undaunted viewer, open up a universe in which the human psyche is reduced to an existential parody of itself and all emotional and behavioral norms are up for grabs. Olivant maintains that escapism is a quick, illusory fix. Ultimately any crisis demands an answerable, unflinching, and creative response, retrieved from the depths of human anguish.
Titles include Waiting for the Conversion, Dupuytren’s and the Demise of Patrimony, Prosthetic Aesthetic, No Improvement Until the Cows Come Home, Caught in the Cross Hairs, Hope for the Wrong Trousers, Those Feet, and Reading to a Dying Horse. Van Proyen ends with these words -“They live in a Sartrean hell of programmatic indifference, impassively seeking salvation from a runaway complexity that changes guises while moving in rhetorical circles. Nonetheless, it is their hell, and the fact that it is portrayed as a familiar one makes it seem something like home.”
Strata Gallery is open from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday – Saturday. For more information about Strata, the current exhibit, and the future schedule of events, please visit the Strata Gallery website and Instagram.
David Olivant, Albrecht Dürer Gathers No Moss, Retroglyph, 22 x 30 in, 2022
David Olivant, Those Feet, Early Retroglyph, 30 x 41 in, 2020
David Olivant, Eye Witness, Early Retroglyph, 30 x 22 in, 2021