529 West 20th Street, 5FL
New York, NY 10011 212-352 8058
Owu, 2015, plasto-yarn, twine, wool and found object, 32x22x91 inches, 81x56x231cm
Ifeoma Anyaeji
Owu (Threading)
Sculpture
September 24th – November 7th, 2015
Skoto Gallery is pleased to present Owu (Threading),
an exhibition of recent mixed media sculpture by the Nigerian-born
artist Ifeoma Anyaeji. This will be her second solo show at the gallery.
The artist will be present at the reception on Thursday, September 24th, 6-8pm.
Ifeoma Anyaeji’s recent work continues her exploration
of discarded materials, its quality and physical nature, placing
emphasis on process to activate a meaningful engagement and creative
openness that strives to reinvigorate newly acquired techniques and
ideas. Her work centers on the idea of up-cycling or concept of material
re-use such as the ubiquitous non-biodegradable plastic bags and
bottles into something of greater value and unorthodox, eliciting unique
elements of ripeness and continuous growth. Using traditional hair
plaiting techniques from her homeland, she threads and braids discarded
plastic bags into plasto-yarns combined with a strong compositional
ability into complex yet lyrical visual narratives filtered through
cultural memories and contemporary realities that reflect subtle
understanding of context and an awareness of the relationship between
function and experimentation.
Ifeoma Anyaeji’s work is dense with visual complexity
that reflects an awareness of a vast array of both formal and inherited
traditions while exploring their aesthetic, sensual, and visual content
to assert a different declaration, and a new way of making art. By
imbuing mundane materials, marks and processes with surprising
significance and intricate design, her work is transformed into an
extraordinary visual poetry with rich textures of vibrations and
pulsations that allow the viewer a freedom of imagination,
interpretation and emotional response. The exhibition includes a strong
selection of new works that are persistently innovative and demonstrate
an awareness of the expressive possibilities of abstraction while
encouraging us to probe into common elements of the human experience. “Queen Eliza”
mimics the wannabe look of a young ‘fashionista’, merging a
conspicuous, traditional and almost uncoordinated webbed hair-do with
fancy psychedelic heels cropped from colonial fashion, challenging the
line between newness and the new. ‘Made in ‘Shina’ speaks the
language of an accrued compulsive material acquisition and an
architectural build-up of these acquisitions – of course almost all made
in ‘Shina’.
Ifeoma Anyaeji was born 1981 in Benin City, Nigeria.
She obtained an undergraduate degree in Painting with honors from the
University of Benin, Benin City, Nigeria in 2005 and as a Ford
Foundation International Fellow, she obtained her MFA, Sculpture in 2012
at the Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Arts, Washington University,
St Louis, Missouri, USA. She has participated in several solos and
group exhibitions at home and abroad, including ‘Reclamation’,
University of Missouri, Columbia in 2012 and Basket Case II, National
Gallery of Zimbabwe, Harare, 2014. She was the Washington University in
St Louis Nominee for the 2012 International Sculpture Center Outstanding
Student Achievement Award. She is in several collections in Africa,
Europe and the US. She is in the faculty at the University of Benin,
Nigeria, and currently pursuing a PhD program at Concordia University,
Montreal, Canada.
Artist Statement
Art is a limitless expressive tool of freewill.
Therefore, its visual thoughts can serve to remind us that the
limitation of one’s imagination is a limitation to one’s growth. And art
devoid of optimistic imagination is art with limitations. As an artist,
I have always had an interest in producing artworks that communicate
with and integrate elements of and from my environment. This manifests
in my choice of medium and style of rendition. My work is about the
transitions of culture, the concept of recycling and material reuse, as a
review of our cultural attitude to the ideology of product newness,
value and the expiration date.
Through my works, I reflect on cultural descriptions
of value and value systems drawn from elements that reflect social
abnormalities. I am intrigued by process and the use of non-conventional
materials as visual medium, like sand, wood and plastic, using the
language of lines to transgress meaning and form and to replicate my
memory of nature, the social and political. I am interested in the art
of Up-cycling is to create a “new value” for that assumed to have lost
its “newness”.
My concept of material reuse through the
transformation of an object’s physical state, as an alternative to
recycling by mechanized chemical disintegration, is to echo the
environmental implication of accumulation and the extensiveness of a
politicized archaeology of modernity’s consumptive system. This I
conceive by creating a complexity of sculptural forms that allow for
multiple interpretations of the functionality of an object after it has
been consumed. I envisage a multiplicity of uses while retaining the
physical state of the discarded object. I choose to work with
conventional and non-conventional materials to create flexibility in my
creation of forms.
The most recent of my non-conventional media are, two
of the main global environmental pollutants, discarded plastic bags and
bottles. I chose these pollutants based on their popularity in my home
country Nigeria. With these I visually express the narrative of a
domestic object’s possible transition from discarded to the aesthetic or
functional – the transition from redundancy to utility. This style of
art I have called Plastoart, coined from the words plastic and art.
The forms are conceived using the traditional craft
skills of loom weaving and Nigerian hair Thread braiding (Threading) to
manipulate the initial physical structure of my chosen medium. Braiding
and weaving the plastic bags and up-holstering the plastic bottles with
the bags enables me to conceive a complexity of sculptural forms that
allow for a multiple interpretation of the potential functionality of
these discarded mediums. With the spiraled patterned, fabric-like and
organic forms I am able to make three and two dimensional forms. Most of
the forms I make reference household furniture, architectural
structures and fabric, like tables, chairs, wall partitions, tapestry
and chair upholstering fabric.
My style reflects the environmental and is art for
social engagement - an art for recreating economic value for these
wastes. Thematically, I express an interplay of metaphorical themes
drawn from traditional folklore, fashion, music and poetry. Used plastic
bags may be tagged an environmental pollutant but to me it is a rich
viable resource that must be exploited beyond its pre-designed use, even
by an artist.
Ifeoma Anyaeji, 2015
Montreal, Canada
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