Devin Ratheal

My current paintings explore the idea that “mundane” perception floats unsteadily upon a flowing river of inherited unconscious symbolism. Like the Romantic notion that the evolution of vertebrate life is recapitulated in the development of the human fetus, this work comes from imagining my materialist experience as a transmogrification of the religious worldviews of my ancestors. Representation, as a method of forming relationships with and controlling the nonhuman, is a critical part of all human culture. Within the turbulence of American culture, I perceive the struggle of sensing without the power to make sense. Worldviews, frames, are not enough to ward off seismic shifts that everyone can feel. I seek to make visible, and give space to, the alien immediacy I perceive within and behind our worldviews. The works are ruptures in the visual fabric of our world in which the nonhuman flow is freer to wobble, to excite, and to remind us of what is felt everywhere.

YouTube: Artist Talk at IA&A at Hillyer