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Art Show Opening at Vesper | “Olly Olly Oxen Free: Religious Revealing in Contemporary Practice"
Olly Olly Oxen Free is a playful call to reveal that which is hidden. In this act of unhiding, we realize that what we’re looking for comes from the overlooked sort of places–in plain sight. In this show, artists are using common religious cultural assets like icons, crucifixes, tombstones, scripture, and liturgical elements as the sites of inquiry into broader topics like gender, intimacy, embodiment, afterlife, the sublime, and more. These objects and symbols are charged, yet overlooked, often seen as mystic relics from a previous irrational age, and yet, these artists are using fragmentation, malfunction, multiplication, and automation as agents in the reinterpretation of these motifs, revealing paradoxes and defying simple readings. Through the artistic practices of Hannah Alsdorf, Matheiu Houde, Connor Walden, and Marcus Clarke, the charged nature of religious assets is deployed in oscillation between the critical and the sentimental, laying a path forward for meaningful religious inquiry fit for our metamodernist moment–an increasingly fragmented and pluralistic reality. The multiplicity of interpretive lenses in these works simulate our own multiplicity of belief in sacral traditions. Olly Olly Oxen Free holds the dissonance of religion and art as a unique space underrepresented in the art world, and as in yelling “Olly Olly Oxen Free”, serves as a playful act two-fold: (1) to reveal that which is hidden, and (2) to begin again, in the ways we think about religion and contemporary art.
