It looks like a red door from the storage room of a high school drama department — roughly painted and cheerfully vandalized. The first indications that this door is more than just that are the images of two medieval saints scratched into the reflective windowpanes. Then there’s the ancient fertility figure with pink polka dots on its left side jutting out from the bottom of the door, sitting on some faded piano keys. The work, titled “1 Billion Saints,” is displayed in Angelbert Metoyer’s exhibit at the University Art Gallery, which opened in January and will run through March 19.
Encouraged to cultivate his art from an early age, Metoyer participated in various art competitions and eventually studied at the Atlanta College of Art and Design. Since then, he has been featured in several group and individual exhibits and has obtained a cosmopolitan following. Two of the pieces in the exhibit, “Hollywood” and “Olydon,” are owned by San Diego Chargers linebacker Donnie Edwards, and other prominent fans of Metoyer’s works include Dr. Dre and Oprah.
Metoyer incorporates many symbols in his work. Most of the pieces have numbers with connotations (3, 7, 13) as well as numbers without such (6, 8, 14) floating around them like alphabet soup. His juxtaposition of such numbers challenges the viewer to rethink the traditional meaning of numbers.
“Angels in Space” also challenges tradition in that it reverses the traditional left to right direction of time; it shows a chronological devolution from right to left in the form of three toddler figures. The first child’s angelic wings and smooth lines turn into double chins and wrinkles that show time’s perversion of individual purity.
But the main theme of Metoyer’s work seems to be layering various civilizations and human experiences. In this sense, time adds richness to the body of preserved work. His pieces are a sort of artistic yearbook, on which people from different times and places have “autographed” their artistic legacies. He employs a wide variety of media, including disembodied pages of books, sheet music and even bird down.
Savannah mammals in “6 Moments (1-12)” show cavemen’s first attempts at art; the winged horse Pegasus and the ferryman Charon represent ancient Greek mythology, while different angel and saint figures reflect Christian art. Instead of a typical setting, these figures are enveloped with colorful noise that frames them effectively and sets them apart as entities in themselves.
These images culminate in the centerpiece of the exhibit, the epic “The House of Warriors.” Standing at approximately 13 feet by 13 feet, the work incorporates the mythology of his other work as well as various geometric figures transcribed within one another, which gives it an ancient Mesoamerican feel. The rich complexity of the mythological images portrayed in the piece shows that element of timelessness. Against the backdrop of established images, Metoyer adds his own mark, including the trio of toddlers and the numbers. In choosing to represent warriors, ubiquitous in ancient art, he connects disparate civilizations in a satisfying manner. If only they sold posters like this on Library Walk.
A pleasant surprise is “#7 (Shaman’s Wedding Dress),” a white wedding dress lit up from the inside with Christmas lights. Small Polaroids of human faces, safety-pinned to the dress with roughly cut red ribbon, seem to symbolize embryonic seeds of the shaman. What is special about this piece is that Metoyer completed it in January at UCSD while overseeing the assembly of the exhibit and used student curator Rachel Faust’s and various other UCSD students’ faces in the work.
