The New Orleans-born artist Angelbert Metoyer is perhaps more deserving of the term “shaman” than most who are described as such, exploring what he calls the “hidden language of religion” across a broad variety of ritualistic processes and artistic
The New Orleans-born artist Angelbert Metoyer is perhaps more deserving of the term “shaman” than most who are described as such, exploring what he calls the “hidden language of religion” across a broad variety of ritualistic processes and artistic mediums. Next month, he exhibits his latest works in an exhibition entitled Icon Execution at the GR N’Namdi Gallery in Chicago: a show designed to dismantle the spectre of racism in American society, for which he has created a series of works depicting beheaded monuments to confederate generals. The exhibition will also include a series entitled M-Windows, heavily layered glass pieces that explore the apparatus of collective memory. Here, Metoyer tells AnOther how, if we look into the windows long enough, they might just help us to envision a parallel dimension.
Angelbert Metoyer: I think that race is something far more abstract then we can even understand. It’s not about black or white, it’s more about which archetypes you choose to align yourself with. Essentially, I’m dealing with alchemy, religion, ritual and science. I mean, there is a scientific element to what I am doing in these works and yet they still create beauty. The whole process is actually alive. The M-Windows are made up of a series of recorded actions and all of those actions are present inside the form. They are an attempt to capture and employ the equation of time-memory-moment. Every memory is just an intervention in time made up of the stimuli around you contained within the moment: whether it’s two seconds of a conversation overheard in the street, the sound of the ocean, or a tornado siren. The M-Windows explore that notion and suggest multi-dimensionality and the possibility for teleportation. Layered within the frame are images forged from the excrements of industry: coal, glass, oil, tar, mirrors, mud, gold dust... elements that represent temporal waste, destruction and eternity. The creation of the M-Windows is an order of various actions that create visions, almost a way of recalling archetypal memories, and these memories are the source of the forms that my hands conjure. Some of the ghosts I have summoned in Icon Execution kind of scare me – they are like a demonology – but the product of the process is nothing more than a souvenir of the memory: a door into the experience. It’s important to realise that memories are not ever truly our own, they are profound moments in a matrix of time. I think that we can maybe use them to fold time and write a new history... These works are an investigation into that possibility.
Interview by John-Paul Pryor
Icon Execution is showing at the GR N'Namdi Gallery from September 10.
