This year, the Denton Black Film Festival invites you to the UNT CoLab to experience AXIS, an exhibition by Demetrius Oliver. Running from January 27 to February 15, 2025. AXIS shows a profound feeling of exploration through continuous video screening Terrestrial and accompanied with floor-based sculptures. Influenced by unmanned vehicles that explore the surface of distant worlds. The floor is littered with banal objects using everyday items like tea kettles, light bulbs, and tires to evoke poetic associations between physical materials and abstract ideas. Both introspective and transformative, Terrestrial contemplates the nature of space from the vantage point of an artist’s studio.
Demetrius Oliver is a Brooklyn-born multidisciplinary artist whose work spans photography, video, sculpture, and drawing. Oliver’s work is distinctly anti-autobiographical, giving his work a mysticism that is referred to as a “presence-absence dichotomy”. Defying conventionalism and categorization through his various mediums. Like many of his works Terrestrial appears to be a continuation of his anti-autobiographical style leaving an open ended narrative for the audience to identify with, it gives an out of body experience of examining our lives in several parts.
Oliver holds a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design (1998) and an MFA from the University of Pennsylvania (2004). His extensive career includes prestigious residencies such as the Core Program at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; The Studio Museum in Harlem; and Light Work. His work has been exhibited widely, with recent notable inclusions in The Dirty South at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and Rising Sun: Artists in an Uncertain America at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. He has presented solo exhibitions at institutions including the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston and the Print Center in Philadelphia.
Beyond galleries, Oliver’s commissions expand the boundaries of art presentation. In 2010, he created a large-scale public installation for New York’s High Line, featuring a 25-by-75-foot billboard, musical performances, and stargazing sessions. His work has been reviewed by The New York Times, Artforum, The New Yorker, and other leading publications. He currently lives and works in Harlem, New York City.
The exhibition will open with a special opportunity to meet the artist during a gallery tour on Friday, January 24, from 4 – 6 PM. This exclusive preview allows visitors to hear firsthand about Oliver’s creative process and his inspiration for his work. UNT CoLab’s presentation of Axis deepens Demetrius Oliver’s exploration of art being transcendent, bridging the terrestrial and the extraterrestrial. He redefines the tactile connections between familiar forms and foreign bodies, inviting audiences to encounter cosmic elements in unexpected, deeply resonant ways.
Admission is free, the CoLab is open Tuesday through Saturday. Come experience Axis by Demetrius Oliver.
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Written by: Taylor Hilley-Carroll |
MA Art History and Visual Culture Graduate Student