portal series

To understand ourselves and our history means to reflect on time, and to understand time, we need to reflect on ourselves and the histories that transported us here- to this exact moment. 

When I started the portal series, I was thinking about the ways culture influences our ideas of the rhythms and cyclicalities of our existence and the ways we experience phenomena in the physical and non-physical world through time and space. Inspired by the Yoruba non-linear understanding of life and death, this body of work explores the experience of temporal structures and the way they define our experience of being in the world. The circular forms that dominate are imprints of portals and traces of memories manifested as temporal structures or windows into different worlds symbiotically interacting with our sense of beginnings and endings. 

Each painting is individually inscribed with a stylized cowrie that is embedded amongst a neural network of materially interwoven and temporally linked portals, as a measure of intervention of time, generating the space to affix oneself to a certain reality or transport to another. The portal series is a practice of time bending, transporting, and transmitting matter, space, and time, asking us to re-examine our understanding of the time-space continuum, granting the present passage to the past and offering unique and boundless opportunities to the future.

The portal series is a journey to finding possibility, and newness through the imagination of a vast world waiting to be occupied. It is an embodiment of our histories, our memories, our nostalgia, and our desires.

The work seeks to reshift and reexamine how our understanding of time dictates our experience of being. How will the way we understand time reflect on the ways we see ourselves? How will reflecting on history and ourselves influence remembrance? How will that remembrance move and change through time and space? How can we travel through time to recover the memories of our ancestors? How will those memories of the past shape the future? In what ways can we preserve the future of our culture and how will that preservation remember the present which is us/we?