Tiwani Contemporary presents through August 13, 2022 “The Company She Keeps“, a group exhibition featuring five artists who work universally. Their works, in substantial and global ways, draw attention to proximity, methodologies of repair, and the valuing of labor.
Chioma Ebinama (US/NI) is based in Athens, Greece. She draws on animistic folklore and non-Western methods of reasoning, and conceptualizes her understandings in the form of drawings and watercolors on tissue paper. “The Company She Keeps” will highlight Chioma Ebinama‘s hanging circular painting, Bride 2 Create in 2022, prompted by a scene of marital ceremony as featured in Chinua Achebe’s exemplary 1958 novel, “Things Fall Apart“. This work will be accompanied by a sound piece, Prayer for when dread strikes at day break.
Miranda Forrester (UK) is based in London. Two large-scale works will be on view: the diptych “Give Me All of You” and “Introspection I-IV,” an installation that incorporates a 20-foot-long stencil painting and a series of four compositions using oil, gloss and images on polycarbonate panels.
The installation depicts an exchange disconnected from family life and interiority, organized by the looks and affections shared between the women.
Temitayo Ogunbiyi (NI/US/JA) is a Lagos-based artist and curator interested in how commerce, engineering, history, and natural societies inform collaborations and movements that write public and confidential space. Working in the disciplines of painting, drawing and sculpture, she presents “You will labor to find value anew (sweet mother),” which addresses women’s ability and labor.
Lagos-based Nengi Omuku (NI) will present “Candyscape,” which adjusts her inclinations in political/social representations of the metaphorical body to capture the psychotherapeutic effect of the scene on the mind. Through his inimitable use of the texture of Sanyan silk. Her work “Candyscape” is a large-scale oil painting that immediately recommends a retreat for the body to seal in the useful strength of authentic and idealized scenes.
Charmaine Watkiss (UK) is based in London. Her set of new drawings, “Àse” (2022), transports Watkiss’ matrilineal deities to Nigeria. These plant heroes are human and deep encapsulation of plants and restorative seeds spread to new worlds from West Africa through transoceanic trade between the 16th and 19th centuries. The Company of the Gods is a rite of keeping and repairing – ceremoniously recalling what has been taken as greenery.
“The Company She Keeps” is open at Tiwani Contemporary in Lagos through August 13, 2022.