AFROABSTRACTURE

VILLAGER's practice employs a methodology they have coined as "AFRO-ABSTRACTURE." The visualization of this method is channeled through the abstract non-figurative intuitive exploration of the work itself- using color, texture, and line patterns to manipulate or mimic African traditional fabrics. 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. By featuring both visual and contextual embodiments of cowries, African traditional 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 investigates how historical African art, cultural practices, and knowledge systems continue to inform and shape contemporary expressions and experiences.

This body of work is an exploration and transformation of cultural energy saturated in both the material and the metaphysical, visualizing blackness through an Afro-diasporic lens by utilizing carved wood figurines, masks, elements of african spirituality, and other objects/totems of cultural significance to echo a re-examination of thought and consciousness.