ARTIST STATEMENT

Nigerian-born Baltimore-based Multidisciplinary artist, VILLAGER, works using a range of mediums including acrylics, oil, oil pastel, wood, cyanotype, photo, fabrics, and textile arrangements to evoke a visual language characterized by exploring and transforming spiritual energy saturated in both the material and the metaphysical. Challenging the statement, “That’s just how it is” with more human-centered questions- "How did it get to be that way" & “Does it have to be that way" VILLAGER's paintings, soft sculptures, assemblage, cyanotype prints, photographs, installations, audio-visual media, and performance art pieces, investigates humanity as an existential and energetic product of culture and social experience through an afro-diasporic lens. Through this spiritual practice, VILLAGER endeavors to scrutinize, deconstruct, and redefine the existential and paradoxical question of what it means to be a “Contemporary African", echoing a re-examination of consciousness and existentialism grounded in African knowledge systems, cultural and spiritual practices, philosophies, and traditions.

VILLAGER's practice employs a methodology they have coined as "AFRO-ABSTRACTURE." The visualization of this method is channeled through the abstract energetic exploration of the work itself- using color, texture, and line patterns to mimic traditional African fabrics as its embodiment. Their work strives to capture this tactile essence transformed into visually striking, bold, and spiritually charged aesthetic forms that possess "ASE”- a spatially polychronic Yoruba concept of command, energy, power (given or received), authority, creativity, and divine life force in all living and non-living things. 

Through their meticulous research-oriented practice, VILLAGER's work also serves as a contemporary conduit for preserving and granting benevolence to their Yoruba and African cultural heritage. Their work reverberates the influence of cultural systems on the formation of identity and expression- challenging, reconstructing, recontextualizing, and rewriting perspectives on culture, identity, autonomy, freedom, gender, masculinity, labor, and community. By activating the visual and contextual embodiments of African traditional fabrics, carved wood figurines and masks, materials/objects/totems of cultural significance, and various elements of Yoruba and African spirituality practices and rituals, VILLAGER's work reveres how the past is alive in the present, mindfully and intimately honoring the ancestors and their contributions that continue to inform and shape contemporary expressions and experiences

VILLAGER's work is a love letter to all black folks across the diaspora, engaging in the African consciousness of ancestral communion as a way of bridging the past to the present that rekindles the imagination and visualization of a future that embodies the spirit of FREEDOM from colonial imagination.