Night time Gallery is happy to announce Reflections, a presentation of latest work by previous featured artist and previous Radio Juxtapoz guest, Esiri Erheriene-Essi. That is the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. Primarily based in Amsterdam, Erheriene-Essi created these works throughout an ocean, their arrival in Los Angeles a resonant providing—bringing with them the quiet weight of distance traveled and tales carried.
Throughout this new physique of labor, Erheriene-Essi carries on along with her time-honored custom of respiratory life into impressed and discarded pictures, utilizing paint, coloration, and layered ephemera to analyze reminiscence. The artist works by her work with the identical ability and stewardship as a quilter, threading collectively histories by texture and tone. On this new collection, she embraces the flatness of photographic supply materials whereas deepening the emotional and chromatic complexity of brown pores and skin—bringing dimension, variation, and luminosity to the floor.
This evolution is on view in A Royal Flush, a piece depicting what the artist imagines to be a gaggle of males having fun with their final days collectively earlier than deployment to Vietnam. Their faces are marked by a spectrum of hues, highlights, shadows, and undertones, encapsulating the usage of coloration as a instrument to depict emotion.
An archivist and collector first, Erheriene-Essi begins her course of by mining by estates and on-line repositories for faces and vignettes that talk to her. This assortment has amassed throughout continents and oceans, from North America to Europe to Africa, demonstrating the variety of Black id, whereas illuminating the moments which can be common throughout all our reminiscences.
Erheriene-Essi is deeply moved by the connection between the diaspora, not solely throughout geography, however throughout time. All through Reflections she continues her exploration of this relationship. Motifs such because the Black energy fist, the face of Toni Morrison, a “Dismantle Apartheid” pin, all time journey accentuating the which means of timelessness inside the collective reminiscence.
In her dissection of reminiscence, Erheriene-Essi is a visible anthropologist, studying photos for context clues and filling their gaps with gestures from her personal lived expertise. In A reminiscence out of your youth (London Trocadero), a fan poster for Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter tour noticeably sits on the shirt of a woman consuming ice cream within the Seventies. The artist’s temporal twist, fusing collectively previous and current, melds Black iconography with earnest symbols of nostalgia. As an artist, her mastery of collapsing time ensures the continuity of the tradition.
These work have been created over the course of two years, in rhythm with the calls for of motherhood—a theme that quietly permeates the work by the lens of legacy and inheritance. Erheriene-Essi sees her follow as an energetic dialog, one which begins along with her work however is accomplished by the viewer’s personal activations of reminiscence.
The exhibition is titled in honor of the music by Diana Ross & The Supremes, a consolation album that has accompanied the artist by many seasons of her life, together with the making of this physique of labor. Essentially the most apropos of the lyrics being:
“Reflections of the best way life was.
Reflections of the love you took from me.”
In light hues and frayed edges, Erheriene-Essi develops an structure of remembrance, for what has been misplaced, and for which ought to by no means be. Her work turn out to be mirrors, not of the previous because it was, however as it’s felt. Reflection as a sacred act of reclamation. –Shaquille Heath
