From The Seattle Times:
IN THE NATIVE AMERICAN spirit board canoe ceremony, a shaman would gather wood panels into the shape of the watercraft and “navigate” into the land of the dead to retrieve the lost soul of an ill or troubled tribal member. In Marvin Oliver’s world, the tradition becomes a metaphor made of glass — thick and muscular, polished and vibrant.
His is splashed with colors, mainly a deep blue at the bottom before transforming into patches of green and red toward the top of its curled tip. It stands upright on a clear-glass cube of a pedestal, which holds a grainy black-and-white photograph of telephone poles and wires. They signify reaching out, transporting ideas and learning. It ties the past to the present and hints about the path ahead, a central theme in his art.
Images of ravens, green, red, yellow, black, are fused into the glass, as if frozen in flight on the four-foot sculpture, one of Oliver’s “Transporter” series. In one version, a bronze raven stands nearby with a salmonberry twig in its mouth. The creatures are ubiquitous in Native American lore and in his work. They’re guides into the unknown.
“My voyage is one of the unknown,” he says with the same matter-of-fact tone he uses to describe the step-by-step mechanics of cutting and fusing glass. “Every time you do something, it is taking you somewhere. My vehicle is art. It takes me to the dark side, which is not the bad side. It’s just the unknown. I don’t know what’s out there yet, but I’ll find out.”
