“Without the Divine” by Olivia Maday & “Twilight Language” by Josiah Bolth
Living Arts of Tulsa
August 19, 2025
“Room will be dark. Proceed with caution,” reads the sign on the main door of Living Arts. Coming inside from a blazing summer afternoon, I found it more of a comfort than anything else to enter what felt like a cave: cool, nearly silent, and so dark that I had to stand still as my eyes adjusted.
There’s a practical reason for the darkness: Olivia Maday’s exhibit “Without the Divine” (one of two in this current Living Arts show, up through August 23) is a nine-channel video installation, with images projected on nearly every surface of Living Arts’ west gallery walls, and light is the enemy of visibility in art that involves projections.
There’s a metaphorical reason for it, too: this work takes inspiration from the Greek myth of Persephone, who was abducted (and in some versions raped) by Hades and ultimately became queen of his kingdom of death, while also serving as goddess of spring for half of the year. The themes in Persephone’s story resonate with those, like me, who like our deities on the untidy side, capable of embodying several truths at once. As violence against women continues apace and women artists continue to challenge male-dominated representations of their lived realities, those themes have staying power.
For Maday, a Boston-based recent MFA grad from Tufts University, such “chthonic” (i.e., related to the underworld) feminist themes are a throughline in her performance and video art, which links 19th-century elements like veils and cabinet cards with contemporary media and materials like raw meat to challenge patriarchal views of women and reassert female agency. One strain in Persephone studies argues that the goddess' story is one of empowerment and renewal, not victimhood or subjugation; it’s this strain that Maday takes up in “Without the Divine,” which appears to be an iteration on her 2024 work "Chthonic Ode.”
The predominant visual in the show is a suspended red liquid, flowing in slow motion down multiple walls. Two signs in the gallery warn of flashing lights and implied sexual violence, both of which appear in subtle forms: a faint shuddering mirage of red light on a black screen; a nude woman’s body flexing like an octopus behind a pane of glass smeared with pomegranates (the fruit Persephone ate that condemned her to stay in the underworld); red hands, backs, and thighs in videos projected onto Mylar panels and spilling over onto the dark wall behind them. Now and then, lines of poetry appear on two small offset walls, odes to defiant self-creation. A barely audible roar accompanies the videos, adding to the feeling of hovering between worlds created by the repetitive, floating images.