Inman Gallery is pleased to start 2024 with an exhibition of new work by Demetrius Oliver, titled Heliacal, on view January 20–March 2, 2024. Please join us Saturday, January 20 at 1pm for a conversation between the artist and writer Raphael Rubinstein, followed by a reception from 2-4pm. Heliacal is Oliver’s sixth solo exhibition with the gallery.
With a proclivity for anonymity, Demetrius Oliver creates works utilizing prosaic materials to explore atmospheric phenomena and the nonhuman world. Painting, photography, video, and sculpture effortlessly commingle within his practice, forming abstractions that resist easy categorization and reveal little about the artist. The intentional omission of his hand – the use of digital photography over film, and aerosol spray over a paintbrush – makes his remove physical, both in the process and the resulting object. Like the geographical formations and natural phenomena from which his practice draws inspiration, his work appears to have happened rather than to have been made.
On view in Heliacal are a suite of new paintings, two sculptures, and a video. The title “heliacal,” meaning of or relating to the sun, directs us towards the cosmos, light, and atmosphere (air) as the show’s conceptual and formal underpinnings. A small sculptural work, titled Bolide II – a term for a bright meteor or fireball – greets the viewer upon entrance, showing a suspended whistle encased in a glass orb. Air bubbles vigorously erode the whistle’s surface, consuming and abstracting its form. A literal suspended animation, the sculpture captures a forceful moment in pause as air exerts control over a mundane object, each bubble a world of its own, a microcosm of the exterior orb and the multitude of reflections contained within.
In the main gallery are series of mid-to-large scale paintings. The quiet canvases show angular lines floating against dusty blue and green-tinted backdrops, revealing the spectral stencils of disassembled umbrella frames. Within the paintings, the suspended marks are reminiscent of debris swept up by a windy storm, while the gradient backdrops suggest a receding distance of thick, cloudy air: a palpable atmosphere. The works exist adjacently to a second, ground level sculpture, titled Emission, showing a radio resting atop a found map of constellations installed in the nearby viewing room. The paintings utilize spray acrylic to resist the painter’s gestural mark, just as the assemblage of found objects equally obscures the hand of the sculptor. The materiality of the (absent) umbrella frame compliments the metal antennae extending from the radio in the neighboring sculpture.
Scale varies through the exhibition, distorting perceptions of microscopic and macroscopic and shifting our positionality as viewers. This continues into the south gallery, where viewers are invited to “walk” (crawl) through a dog door size opening to enter the next room, forcing the viewer to experience the space from a different (nonhuman) perspective. This intervention transforms architecture into an event, and loosely references Sirius – nicknamed the Dog Star – the brightest star in the night sky and a frequent motif throughout Oliver’s oeuvre. On view in the south gallery is a video, titled Breed. Complimenting the opening sculpture, Bolide II, the video shows a whistle suspended in a liquid with bubbles blooming on the metal surface. While Bolide II shows an aggressive action suspended in time, Breed grants us a more tranquil and calming meditation on air and its movements.
Scattered with atmospheric impressions, Heliacal points towards phenomena that are invisible – air, wind, space – and the ways they touch our daily life. The resulting abstractions are weighty and ethereal in their transformation of the celestial into the terrestrial: from atmosphere to weather, from starlight to sunlight. Adapting prosaic materials and objects, his works shift our everyday understanding of space, returning agency to the materials and their shared environments to recalibrate our skewed humancentric understanding of the world.
