Noé Olivas: la jornada

Charlie James Gallery is pleased to present noé olivas: la jornada, a multimedia exhibition that explores the intersections between labor and liberation through collective spiritual work. The exhibition centers the implements and aesthetics of the toolshed, bringing together shears, clippers, buckets, and shovels in tender constructions that bridge the gap between this world and the next. olivas calls upon ancestors by transforming materials passed down through his family into references from the Ifá tradition and ritual. With this body of work, olivas hopes to create space for the kind of spiritual and communal labor needed in this divisive moment.

olivas’ objects are imbued with duality: beauty and utility, sharp and soft, earth and heaven. All of these elements come to play in four wall-based sculptures from his Feeding the Birds (Mojuba Iyaami) (2024) series. Here, gardening shears of various sizes have been transformed into opulent devotional objects representing Iyaami, the sacred mothers of Yoruba tradition. These figures often take the form of birds, and olivas’ shears – turned upright, adorned with glittering glass, and trailing braids and beads – recall birds in flight. Bodies of collaged dichroic glass, used primarily in satellite technology, have been kiln-fired to a colorful iridescent sheen that projects our collective prayers into the heavens.

This exhibition explores olivas’ ideas about the poetics of labor, which investigates the connections between labor and leisure, questions who works and how, and seeks to connect to previous generations through physical and spiritual effort. A practitioner of the Ifá religion, olivas also imbues his works with references and meanings drawn from the tradition. In a video piece made in collaboration with the artist’s aunt Tía Concha, created for a billboard project in Los Angeles, four decades of home movies play out on the slowly-growing screen of Tía Concha’s knitting. She becomes powerful in this juxtaposition, as if manipulating threads into life and death itself.

Throughout the gallery hang three Freedom Portals, works from the Windows into Heaven (2023) series that offers conduits to another world, or perhaps another worldview. Small pruning shears have been fused together to create enclosed interiors that hold collaged dichroic glass forms that resemble both the infinite stretch of deep space and the humble paddle of a cactus. A hazy boundary between the cosmic and the ordinary characterizes much of olivas’ work, their edges intentionally blurred. Elsewhere in the gallery, an everyday five-gallon bucket formed from terracotta clay holds a gently bubbling fountain, its cool waters encouraging calm and coolness in a heated time and a call to the ancestors who spring from the cool waters.

The smaller back gallery holds five long-handled tools formed in neon. The soft buzz and glow of these Herramientas espirituales (2024) creates a hushed, chapel-like space, one which invites the viewer to imagine the ways in which we can continue the work of our predecessors toward liberation. Now is the time to build a coalition and do the work this day requires, olivas suggests.

The exhibition opening will be accompanied by a performance that explores themes of forgiveness, compassion, and cosmic energies through the repetitive motions of tending to palm trees.