Jack Shainman Gallery is happy to current Ilé Oriaku, an exhibition of multimedia drawings and works on paper by past Juxtapoz cover artist, Toyin Ojih Odutola, the artist’s seventh solo present with the gallery. Constructing upon her inclusion within the Nigerian Pavilion on the Venice Biennale and her solo exhibition on the Kunsthalle Basel, each in 2024, these works current episodic scenes that collectively discover the makes use of and limitations of language—together with its magnificence each in failure and success—as a car for processing grief and as a software for creating private which means and collective historical past.
The central web site that every of those works unfolds in is an imaginary Mbari home, a sacred area rooted within the traditions of the Nigerian Owerri Igbo the place members of the neighborhood may very well be celebrated and the place deities, those that defend the neighborhood from supernatural acts of tragedy and misfortune, may very well be honored as properly. Historically crafted from uncooked supplies resembling clay, wooden and straw, these buildings have been usually adorned with figures, sculptures, geometric patterns and wall work depicting religious or mythological themes. The Mbari home that Ojih Odutola has created pays tribute to her late grandmother and uncle who belonged to the Igbo and Yoruba ethnic teams, respectively: ‘Ilé’ means ‘home,’ ‘constructing,’ or ‘residence’ in Yoruba, whereas ‘Oriaku’ is her grandmother’s Igbo title. So named for her departed members of the family, this Mbari home features as a dramatic stage for Ojih Odutola’s figures the place they typically appear caught in between poses or proper earlier than or after an trade, whereas additionally offering an area of religious and cultural communion along with her ancestors.
Although the Mbari home supplies a culturally particular architectural reference, the precise areas that Ojih Odutola creates from it are sometimes fragmented, blurred and interrupted, such that her figures are not often depicted freed from obstructions. In an analogous vein, her topics frequently obscure their very own faces with arms or items of clothes, or they seem with their backs turned or in profile. Whereas Ojih Odutola constantly renders what she has referred to as her ‘religious performers’ in states of indeterminacy and transition—on the cusp of communication or in its quick aftermath—she additionally portrays them in movement and caught between bodily positions. She frequently makes use of titles that invoke the stage and its areas of dramatic manufacturing, implying a story relation between the works whereas additionally creating dissonances between what the titles describe and what the drawings present. Regardless of the shifts in perspective that occur round these figures, they’re nonetheless imbued with nice psychological presence and specificity, as Ojih Odutola permits them to be learn as portraits as a lot as religious ciphers. They floor us within the current whereas offering a hyperlink to the previous.
The advanced but delicate tone that Ojih Odutola achieves all through the exhibition outcomes largely from the delicacy of her supplies and the precision with which she makes use of them. For these works she used quite a lot of supplies together with charcoal, chalk, coloured pencil, graphite and pastel on substrates various from paper, linen, canvas board and Dura-Lar movie. Every work, whether or not of an intimate or monumental scale, is rendered with luminous shade that so typically shimmers throughout the fractured and prismatic architectural areas. The jewel-like high quality of her shade palette is rooted within the custom of Mbari artwork, the place the geographical supply of a pigment contributes to its symbolic which means—for instance yellow, symbolizing vitality, was sourced from a sacred web site alongside Nigeria’s Imo River, whereas inexperienced, representing renewal, comes from the identical river’s clay. Although they carry with them traditionally particular registers of which means, the colours Ojih Odutola makes use of are simply as important for his or her emotive and descriptive energy, or for the way in which they join the worlds of her figures to that of our personal.
These drawings specific Ojih Odutola’s consideration of the ways in which language, whether or not verbal or bodily, can act as a barrier to communication simply as a lot as it could possibly facilitate it. Private and cultural contexts stay essential for her, particularly almost about her and her household’s expertise of present between the languages and customs of their native Nigeria and people of the West extra broadly. These figures and the scenes they stay inside are outlined by their drive for familial and communal connection, no matter any impediment. By doing so that they recommend that new languages can nonetheless be created.
Coinciding with the exhibition would be the launch of Ilè Oriaku, a brand new monograph that paperwork Ojih Odutola’s twin displays at Kunsthalle Basel and the Nigerian Pavilion through the 2024 Venice Biennale. Designed by Pacific Books and co-published with Kunsthalle Basel, Ilè Oriaku affords a detailed take a look at the artist’s richly detailed and illustrative work that captures the nuances of her characters with distinctive precision whereas additionally straight inspecting her Nigerian heritage. Much like the exhibition at Kunsthalle Basel, the area of the publication evokes an imaginary Mbari home as a grid, taken from the exhibition partitions, is abstracted on the printed web page to create a conceptual connection to the work and writing inside. Scholarly texts by Mohamed Almusibli, Olamiju Fajemisin and Erin Jenoa Gilbert accompany artistic contributions from Nelene Ojih Odutola, Toyin Ojih Odutola, Josephine Oriaku Ojih and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye.
