From outdated pictures of Black life in Princeton and Ithaca to the physique politics she is aware of extra intimately, Onome Daniella Olotu’s forthcoming Lagos solo exhibition strikes between the locations she has lived in and the identities she has encountered alongside the way in which. Okechukwu Uwaezuoke writes
“Watching a bonfire from the height of a four-storey building while trying to balance on one leg…” That is Onome Daniella Olotu’s dramatic, certainly humorous, approach of describing what it’s like to look at Nigeria from the US and Europe. “While I have love for Nigeria, there is deep sorrow in my heart from the grief of seeing what she could or could have been, in terms of ‘working systems’ compared to where I am living,” says the 33-year-old.
From that “height”, she notices what works elsewhere and, by comparability, what doesn’t work from home. She nonetheless hopes that a few of what works there may work right here too.
Going overseas has not made her any much less Nigerian. If something, it has made her extra acutely aware of what she desires to retain. She refused, as an illustration, to accumulate an accent merely to “fit in”. People understood her effectively sufficient. So why change the way in which she spoke?
Olotu’s first solo exhibition in Nigeria, after a number of solos and group reveals overseas, is at Soto Gallery in Ikoyi, Lagos, from November 4 to December 15. Before We Know Ourselves, a title the curator settled on whereas placing the exhibition collectively, is split into the Postcard Series and the Mask Series.
In “Sage Hall, 1875”, a ten x 8-inch portray from 2025, Sage Hall at Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin, occupies the fitting aspect of the canvas. Its steep gables, central tower and arched home windows are set towards the painted floor.
On the left, handwritten phrases disappear right into a thick, bumpy smudge of magenta and pink earlier than ending with the legible “Your Cousin, Onome”. Above them is a inexperienced classic postage stamp crossed by a darkish cancellation mark. At the decrease proper, an outdated multi-storey constructing pushes out of the pink.
Then there’s “Sunday Gist at Griggs Corner Amoco” (Postcards from Princeton). Three girls in classic garments and hats stand beside a basic blue automobile exterior Griggs’ Corner Amoco petrol station. The 2024 portray appears like an outsized postcard, full with a stamp bearing actress Hattie McDaniel and a crimson postmark dated July 11, 1983.
In “Mr Lee, John Broadway, and Iheanyi at Lee’s Barber Shop” (Postcards from Princeton), three males stand on the steps exterior Lee’s Barber Shop. A commemorative stamp bearing novelist Ernest J. Gaines’s portrait sits within the higher proper, crossed by a crimson postmark: “PRINCETON, N.J. FEB 13 2 PM 1963”. At the underside proper, a handwritten letter addressed to “Dear Grandpa” accommodates household information and references to the barbershop and Princeton landmarks.
The Princeton work started when Olotu observed how few Black households she noticed round her and found that the Witherspoon-Jackson group had as soon as been a lot bigger. She started speaking to educator and historian Shirley Satterfield and different residents, whereas digging via the collections of the Historical Society of Princeton and the Arts Council of Princeton. The analysis opened up household histories going again 4 generations and extra.
Olotu describes the work as postcards she may need despatched house, recording Black life in Princeton earlier than the group modified. But a number of the outdated pictures are already so evocative that the work have little left to do.
The work are extra convincing when Olotu will get in the way in which of the pictures. Handwritten phrases intrude into a few of them. Pink and magenta unfold throughout others, breaking apart the floor. These colors are a great distance from the sepia remedy often given to outdated pictures. They make the work seem like work, reasonably than merely outdated pictures dressed up for show.
Postcards from Ithaca attracts on pictures and paperwork from the History Center in Ithaca and Cornell University’s Rare Manuscript Collections. Olotu picked out pictures that reminded her of arriving in a brand new place and labored on them in paint. The reconstructed postage stamps commemorate individuals whose contributions she desires to attract consideration to. But the cancellation marks run straight throughout their faces.
In the Mask Series, Olotu turns the highlight to the human physique. The 10 work embody the six-part “The Crime of a Little More Flesh” I–VI, drawing on the experiences of her sister and different big-bodied individuals coping with physique shaming and physique dysmorphia. Her figures are stretched, enlarged and blurred, their our bodies pushed out of practice. Scratched traces and bits of screen-printing run throughout them.
Some are disturbing. But when the identical units maintain turning up, they start to lose their chunk. The higher ones make the viewer work slightly more durable.
Has making these works modified her reply to what it means to be in locations that frequently query her presence?
“Honestly, no,” she replies. Instead, it has challenged her “to remain authentic and be better”. She calls it “flipping the script”. People query what they don’t perceive, she says, or what they intentionally refuse to know.
She quotes Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: “A single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete.”
The politics, discussions and insurance policies round immigration have left her with extra questions. If Nigeria functioned the way in which it was purported to, would she be right here, “looking over my shoulders and getting little panic attacks when I read the news”?
No, she wouldn’t.
