Introduction Olivia Shao
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Of Mythic Worlds: Works from the Distant Past through the Present explores the ways that rituals, myths, traditions, ideologies, and beliefs can intersect across cultures, histories, and time periods. Using an art historical lens that eschews notions of linear progress, this exhibition and publication project highlights how multiple perspectives can coexist. The fifty-three works included in this presentation originate from different places and periods: the earliest examples include a block print from the Qing dynasty (China, 1644–1912) and a nineteenth-century Shaker gift drawing, while other works span the decades from the 1940s to today. The commonalities— both visual and conceptual—that connect the individual histories of these works stem from a universal pursuit to understand that which is outside of our objective, worldly experience. Investigations in personal belief systems, spirituality, and consciousness are seen in the works of several artists. A number of the works also explore the metaphysical and the sublime, the cosmologies of Tantra and Taoism, and views on mysticism and immateriality. Still other works recall myths passed down from ancient cultures and cross the mystical with cultural narratives. Several of the featured artists have a writing practice, and others are writers who create art. While language and art both provide a means of communicating ideas, in the instance of art, the visual can often express that which words cannot. As the filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky wrote: “Artistic images are always a metonym, where one thing is substituted for another…The infinite cannot be made into matter, but it is possible to create an illusion of the infinite: the image... None of this can be understood in any cerebral sense.
