Spotlight: Nathaniel Oliver

JULY 9-AUGUST 9, 2024

The Spotlight series includes a new or never-before-exhibited artwork paired with a commissioned piece of writing, creating focused and thoughtful conversations between the visual arts and authors, critics, poets, scholars, and beyond. In this iteration, the Spotlight features Nathaniel Oliver’s Would you believe me if I showed you, 2024.

In Conversation with Nathaniel Oliver and Zoé Samudzi

Nathaniel Oliver:  In connection with the show itself, I would say that the my solo exhibition at Karma, New York, My journey was long, so yours could be shorter, 2024, focused on ancestral knowledge and the passing down of that knowledge through narration, drawing, and different ways to hold account of memory.

FLAG’s Spotlight piece, Would you believe if I showed you (2023), is the action of someone telling a story or a group of people telling a story. There's just one person in the painting sketching out what the monster is in the story and giving light to the trauma that they all can see or feel.

The narrator, the scribe or the oracle, details this account, and is surrounded by different Pan-African artifacts. They are revelatory entities that make reference to Moors, to the Boa people from the Democratic Republic of Congo, etc.

The narrator or the image-maker actually translates from a seventeenth century print by  Bartolomeo Coriolano, who was an Italian wood print maker, of the figure of the Sybil. I thought she was really interesting in terms of the ominous undertones of an oracle’s purpose. The creature she's drawing in my take on Sybil goes into playing with what we think about - monstrous, grotesque things that are beautiful in their own way - but still we see a threat in them.

The monster is actually structured from the action of pareidolia, making faces out of things that aren't really face-like so we ascribe stories to the unknown when we don't have anything real, tangible, or factual. This is my way of alluding to mythical activation, especially when it comes to creating a religion or creating an understanding of life.

Zoé Samudzi: In diaspora, all of these commonalities are born out of reiterations of Black practice that comes from a source and then gets adapted in all of these other places. I mean, the oracle in your piece is wearing a cowrie earring; we know where that came from as a currency, as something to use to beautify.

There's something interesting that you brought up in the figure that she's depicted in the painting and the concept of pareidolia. I thought it was an animal, an owl or something, but it’s a monster. The way we identify or impose legible meaning onto things is both neurological and cultural. In your own self-description of your work, you're really engaged in magical realism, but I'm also wondering: what is the kind of genre-border or semiotic intersection between magical realism and horror?

NO: That’s something I've been trying to articulate. I had this moment where my grandparents and my mother were sitting in front of my paintings and they asked: what's this ongoing obsession with water? We always see brief references to water or horizon lines but we rarely see an expansive body of water.

 Everything is always on the cusp or at the edge; literally, the border. I'm playing with where the border lies. I have a piece called At What Cost Do I Stay or Go? (2023); it is literally the embodiment of the control of a border. There’s a cost of moving from one side to the other and back over, a sacrifice whether it be literal or cerebral. But to speak more towards the balancing of figuring out the monstrous and the grotesque, there’s something inviting about Would you believe me if I showed you, but then when you see what the oracle had drawn in other paintings, it’s obviously a monster.

ZS: And that's the ambivalence.

NO: Exactly. It’s upping that ante. Winzday siege (2021) and Hope it floats (2021) (paintings from the same series) show moments where the monsters are no longer just in the background; they're taking agency in the foreground and playing with the figure more intentionally. Winzday Siege is a pretty yellow painting; there's a female figure in the foreground but then there's actually in the very bottom of the piece, an orange slipper and a man completely slouched over.

ZS:  It actually looks like a drawing of a biblically accurate angel. They always appear beautiful, winged, white, but if you illustrate them based on how they’re described in the Bible, they're quite monstrous.

NO: I've also spoken before that my paintings are in service to something a little bit higher than myself. I don't always go into it with the full awareness of how it's going to be released into the world, and that's me accepting the luminous a little bit and the intuition that goes into making work.

ZS: There's this way that Hope it floats gets interestingly contained within Would you believe me if I showed you. I don't know if the person looking into the water is themselves a monster. I don't know if it's this kind of reflection of some kind of monstrous interiority, some kind of reflection of Blackness and the voided absenting of Black interiority. But there's this really interesting way that this woman is surrounded by all of these symbols, some of which are kind of totemic instruments of power.

You're constantly hiding easter eggs in all your work. You're always traversing this borderland, moving from one element to the next, almost in search of something. This is the eternal question, maybe the question you're asking yourself about your practice or the kind of existential diasporic question we're always asking ourselves: what are we doing here?

NO: I use “breadcrumbs” to try to make sense of the monsters. I used to call them my sea monsters. When you think about the old maps of the world, sea monsters came about by way of explaining and identifying the unknown. It wasn't directly from a true account, more so an imagination. If you play with that idea, it’s just you imposing monstrosity on the things around you as a result of your own fear.

That's the way I was thinking about the sea monster: it’s something I'm still unpacking and trying to understand my proximity to. For Hope it floats, if you look down at the bottom left corner, you'll see that the sea monster’s hand comes out and and overlaps with the other hand as a way of speaking to the idea that he's looking at himself, but then actually the sea monster is its own being.

ZS: The bordering between the kind of self and the other and the monstrous other here.

NO: That's exactly the action of Would you believe if I showed you - the deliverance of that story, this gesture of seeing something and not being believed, trying to come together to identify it, cultivate our shared understanding of this terror, and then present it to others. If you go back to Faith of Fishing, they're throwing this big casting net, but at the bottom of that painting is just the dorsal fin peeking out: the dorsal fins of the monster touching that barrier if we’re speaking about the border or the portal.

ZS: It's making itself known, but it's only making itself known if you understand what you're looking at. 

NO: Like pareidolia. If we were looking at clouds together, you could look at the entire sky and never catch what I was talking about. But once I finally get you to understanding that, for example, a curve right there is for me the bridge of the nose, then you start to play with the drawing that's in my head. You’re able to see what I'm seeing from my perspective. 

About: 

Nathaniel Oliver (b. 1996, Washington, D.C) is an artist living and working in New York, NY. Oliver received his BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI, in 2018. Recent solo exhibitions include My Journey Was So Long So Yours Could Be Shorter, Karma, New York, NY (2024) and Limbo, HOUSING Gallery, New York, NY (2020). Recent group exhibitions include Self-Portraits, GRIMM, Amsterdam, The Netherlands (2024); Art and Design from 1900 to Now, RISD Museum, Providence, RI (2023); and Visions and Nightmares, Simone Subal Gallery, New York, NY (2021). Oliver is the recipient of the Becky Westcott ’98 Memorial Painting Award (2018) and the Gamblin Paint Award (2017). His work is in the collection of the RISD Museum, Providence, RI.  

Zoé Samudzi is the Charles E. Scheidt Visiting Assistant Professor of Genocide Studies and Genocide Prevention at the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Clark University. She holds a PhD in Medical Sociology from the University of California, San Francisco in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences. Zoé is an associate editor with Parapraxis Magazine, and an art critic whose work has appeared in Art in America, Bookforum, The New Inquiry, The Architectural Review, The New Republic, and other outlets.

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