Involuntary Memory – works by Devin Ratheal M.F.A.
Satellite Gallery 1106 5th Street, October 4th 6 pm – 9 pm
Landmark Arts Galleries of the TTU School of Art
Involuntary Memory include paintings that explore the idea that “mundane” perception rests unsteadily upon a flowing river of inherited subconscious symbolism. Like the Romanticist notion that the evolution of vertebrate life is recapitulated in the development of the human fetus, this work comes from imagining my materialist experience as a transmogrification of the religious worldviews of my ancestors. Representation, as a method of forming relationships with and controlling the nonhuman, is a critical part of all human culture. Ratheal sees religious European paintings as an expression of a long history of negotiating with an unknowable, nonhuman otherness. Ratheal seeks to make visible, and give space to, the alien immediateness he perceives in those paintings as a means of allowing it to breathe and express itself anew. The works are ruptures where the nonhuman flow constrained in the originals is freer to wobble, to excite, to remind us of what is felt everywhere, that our world is not human.
They also represent an emergency. The inherited subconscious negotiation with terror is bubbling up to the surface amidst a profusion of images and video that one worldview, one set of representations, cannot weather unscathed. These works also represent the energy being released when swaths of unknowing people who, unable to allow the energy knotted up in these stories and images to find a new expression, seek to make the world an image of hell so that it can, at least, be recognized.
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Landmark Arts exhibitions and speaker programs in the Texas Tech University School of Art are made possible in part with a generous grant from the Still Water Foundation, Austin. Additional support comes from Cultural Activities Fees administered through the J.T. & Margaret Talkington College of Visual & Performing Arts.