Upcoming Solo Exhibition: Devotion, Dreams, and Destiny: Opening Reception
To know where we are headed, we have to know where we are coming from. My transdisciplinary practice begins here–in remembrance, in ritual, in reverence. This call to remember how the past is alive in the present shapes my work across painting, collage, sculpture, printmaking, photography, installation, performance, curation, and cultural facilitation in an interconnected ritual of honoring and remembering Indigenous Yorùbá knowledge systems, spiritual technologies, and ancestral philosophies.
Guided by my migration from my ancestral home, Lagos, Nigeria, to the U.S in 2013, my work is a living archive that reinforces and celebrates Indigenous Yorùbá and epistemologies of art, spirituality, and material culture, simultaneously speculating upon the universal themes of identity, consciousness, loss, and continuity. My process is a sacred, non-linear, intuitive, and intentional one. It reclaims and reimagines the nuances of post-colonial African identity by integrating mark-making, rhythm, fragmentation, color, texture, layering, corporeality, and materiality into a ritual of making that metaphorically mirrors the fluidity, ambiguity, and contradictions of time, culture, and memory. My work emerges at the crossroads of storytelling, material exploration, anthropological research, and speculative possibility, weaving a praxis where matter, metaphysics, science, and spirituality converge.
By reclaiming what colonial legacies have sought to sever, my work explores what it means to be shaped by what we carry and what sustains us. Through my practice, I craft physical and conceptual spaces that question: how are we broken, healed, shaped, and transformed by what we’ve lost? by what refuses to be forgotten? by what endures in the fragments? It is a form of devotional divination that recalls and envisions futures that exist when we remember with care.
my work exists in honor of my ancestors, to keep them alive in my existence. remembrance and reverence are the seeds I plant, the seeds of change that manifest through time. harmony is my harvest, I follow the Yorùbá traditions, customs, and practices of my ancestors that place me in harmonious gratitude with energy, the land, air, water, fire, the earth, and all that is abundantly in it. My work is a ritual, a journey to becoming. My process is an intimate worship of my lineage - mappings of connection to a larger cosmos of knowingness of this world and all of the energies hidden and unseen that catalyze this existence, ÀṢẸ. As my vessel carries the harvest fruits of change, my work becomes ancestral transformation and healing. This practice is my truest devotion to my ancestors, the past, myself, and the present. It is my devotion to time, actualized as a tangible change for the future unborn. ÀṢẸ
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