HOUSTON, TX.- The Contemporary Arts Museum presents the exhibit Perspectives 153: Demetrius Oliver through November 26. Perspectives 153: Demetrius Oliver is the first solo museum exhibition for the Houston-based artist who works in a range of media, including performance, photography, and sculpture. The exhibition features three new works created especially for the show: a series of photographs inspired by Herman Melville’s Moby Dick that invite comparison with the biblical story of Jonah and the whale, and two new slide-projection installations, Funnel and Constellation. By incorporating the elements of performance, prose and poetry into his work, the artist decodes history as told through American literature of the 19th century. Oliver uses his body to animate the literary musings of writers such as Melville, Mark Twain, Emily Dickinson, and Walt Whitman, whose poetry about the American landscape also provides jarring, yet insightful, understanding of inequity and oppression in 19th-century America.

Demetrius Oliver was born in 1975 in Brooklyn, New York. He received a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, an MFA from the University of Pennsylvania, and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. He has previously exhibited in group shows such as “Frequency” (2005-2006) at The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, and he is currently an a Artist-in-Residence (Core Fellow) at The Museum of Fine Arts Houston’s Glassell School.

Perspectives 153: Demetrius Oliver is organized by Contemporary Arts Museum Houston Associate Curator Valerie Cassel Oliver, and will be accompanied by a Perspectives-format catalogue with an essay by Cassel Oliver, reproductions of exhibited work, and documentation on the artist’s career.