Joshua Uvieghara LG reflects on the inspirations, themes, and creative process behind his recent exhibition at 35 Blumen in North Rhine-Westphalia.
A wake can be considered like a shadow; a dynamic index in displacement. The further away from the object that cast it, the more diffuse this displacement. In turn, becoming cast over other things and submerged in complexity, though somehow resonant with the trajectory of its origin. The object and a source of luminosity are what determine such arcs surrounding questions concerning substance in the language of paint and colour.
‘The Comet & The Prospector’s Footprint’ was the title of an exhibition featuring recent paintings from my studio. It was held from June to July 2024, at 35 Blumen, a gallery housed in a former smithy in Krefeld, a city near the Rhine River northwest of Düsseldorf. The gallery is run by a grassroots group of residents. Through their commitment to artistic activity and response to discussions held in local cafés and drinking establishments, they have transformed this independent space into what it has become today.
It’s always an aim to situate what I do so that audiences can make their own connections and meanings. The title of the show, conceived as something to elucidate the work rather than explain it, was initially received as some sort of witty political quip on subject matter my work may only deal with indirectly, being far too slow burning in its process to distinguish here.
However, a title that incorporates tropes or motifs used in a project runs the risk of becoming a cipher and the work becoming a reification of such (Buchloh, 1981). A comet being the highlighted flip side to a shadow has its own fugitive slipstream dynamics and the prospector, in the act of such activity, semi-submerged in a stream’s current, leaves only a momentary footprint on the riverbed – a potential enactment of what the activity of painting as a thought process embodies among other things.
What is it then? Is it a bird? Is it a plane? Or a punctum? (Barthes, 1980). As the arts journalist for the Westdeutsche Newspaper reported following our discussion during the show:
“Whereas earlier works by the artist, who also works as a lecturer and was academically trained in Great Britain, always showed more than shadowy scenes in which people or landscapes – often at night – could be discovered, the figurative element now only runs through the thicket of associative compositions as a motif, as a loose quotation, as a ‘hint’. Here a silhouette – if at all – a figure, a face, a grimace? There, perhaps parts of a landscape, nature or a depiction of heaven and hell.”
Oscar Gazi Laki, C. ‘Joshua Uvieghara’s Images Draw Viewers In’. Westdeutsche Zeitung, 7th June 2024, p 18
Certain motifs might be deciphered from image sources, such as aspirational photographs of Nigerians poised to travel to the UK for studies in the 1960s, which are conflated through drawing composites (Fig. 1) with images of recent surfing activity on the west coast of Africa (Fig. 2). These sources currently serve as a point of departure, without necessitating a conventional approach to representation. During a discussion event held as part of the show, one participant initially insisted that they could not discern such motifs. However, as the hustle and bustle of the evening’s events dissipated, the same person approached me again to report that they could indeed perceive the motifs—albeit from a particular distance that I had not explicitly prescribed. This was especially evident in relation to the scale of one specific painting (Fig. 3), which, at a certain stage in its production process, had to be constructed on the floor of my studio; pushing across the threshold to other notions of pictorial orientation congruent with the flatbed picture plane (Steinberg, 1972).
Constructed and stitched together canvas; motifs of figures semi-submerged in bodies of water; pushing chromatic intensity to the boundary on a level of luminosity that becomes inversely congruent with a nocturnal dynamic that can be perceived through a veil of apparitional movement. It seems apt that Krefeld is also known as the City of Silk and Velvet given the project’s aim in taking such associations to converge on filmic ideas that these filters threw up.
Joshua Uvieghara LG, 2024
.
Reference
– Buchloh, Benjamin H. D. “Allegorical Procedures: Appropriation and Montage in Contemporary Art.” Artforum, vol. 20, no. 1, September 1981
– Steinberg, Leo. “Other Criteria: The Flatbed Picture Plane.” In Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art, 82–91. New York: Oxford University Press, 1972.
.
