Uchay Joel Chima is known for his exploration of memories, imaginations, societal happenings and emotions, when he unveils his latest show, City Dwellers, a solo show featuring recent mixed-media works, the internationally acclaimed artist will be walking a road well taken.
Renowned for his eclectic use of alluring materials and unique artistic process, often questioning environmental and social issues around the world, Chima’s works have continued to evolve, remaining relevant to developments in contemporary art.
Combining found objects and materials, including strings, sand, wax, charcoal, old sacks, with paint and other media of expression, his works are rendered in an aesthetically pleasing manner. His thought provoking works address the realities around humanity whilst employing a mixture of conventional and unconventional approaches in his unceasing explorations.
The show opens on Saturday, May 3, at the Alexis Galleries, Victoria Island, Lagos, it ends May 17. Speaking on the show, the founder and Director of Alexis Galleries, Patty Chidiac-Mastrogiannis, said, it calls on the viewer to “reflect on the demands of social realities and complexities of urbanised city living, which is showcased through the artist’s nuanced use of domesticated and intimate materials synonymous with the notion of transformation, regeneration and the human community within our material spaces.”
Also speaking, Uche Obasi, the show’s curator, said City Dwellers it is a reflection of urban life through the inventive mix-media techniques. “Through a process of deconstruction and reconstruction, he transforms these materials by burning, restoring, and reinventing them into the manifold and duality of meanings, to engage with the idea and agency of transformation, regeneration, and community,” Obasi added.
According to him, Chima’s navigation between meditative and transformative phases allows him to re-imagine and transmute the familiar into socially engaged art. This process also enables him to associate the complexities of the human experience from people absorbed with the daily routine of city life to the untold challenges of urbanisation.
Obasi reveals, the show “urges us to ponder the coercive forces of socio-economic realities and complexities of urbanised city culture while reflecting on Chima’s layered use of intimate and domesticated materials. Working at the intersection of discarded material re-composition and community reorientation, Chima’s work gives agency to transformation and regeneration on the human condition within our increasingly material spaces.”
Known for incorporating and upcycling everyday, consumable materials — from rice sacks, aluminum drinks cans, and burnt wood— into his work, Uchay Joel Chima’s mixed-media works explore the dynamic preoccupation of city people and their built-in hybrid environment, inviting viewers to engage in the daily realities and routine of contemporary urban culture.
From City Dwellers I to Committee of Friends and City Gate, the show draws viewers to global realities, weighty emotions, and the urgency of social and economic impositions and dispositions of city dwellers within their lived experiences and built hybrid environments.
In City Dwellers I, he addresses the realities of city women in an unceasing exploration and pursuit of an easier life. Painted with faint, milkish acrylic colour on a heavily draped rice sack surface, he leaves a contour of protruding forms and embedded threads, with dragged lines of ropes that show four figures – three women closely and affectionately leaning toward one man.
Another painting, Committee of Friends, explores social cohesion and belonging within an ever-busy urban settlement. Rendered with thousands of interlocked threads and knitted ropes glued on a surface, shows an impression of lush-like vegetated background and foreground, dripped in olive colour and a contrast of intense orange color of abstracted silhouetted figures in an unending conversation. ‘Committee of Friends’
City Gate reflects the complexities and fragility of human conditions across urban cities and communities worldwide. Composed of clustered grids of burnt charcoal glued, joined across four unified panels, he reflects the unfortunate devastation caused by a raging inferno that burnt down popular California cities, including Hollywood Hills, Palisades, Eaton, and Hurst, reducing them to a crucible of ashes.
Chima is founder of Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA), Lagos, established in 2018. He studied painting at the Institute of Management and Technology in Enugu, graduating in 1997. He has exhibited his works in prominent galleries and museums around the world including Nigeria, South Africa, Canada, Sweden, Germany, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and the United States.
He was an artist in residence at the One Minute Foundation in Amsterdam, Netherlands in 2010. In 2014, he was at Vermont Studio Centre Johnson, Vermont, United States and also at Spark Box Studio in Ontario, Canada, 2014.
He was selected for the 2015/2016 Platteforum Artist Residency programme in Denver, Colorado, where he was among the four artists chosen through a competitive internationally juried process.
In 2016, he was invited by the University of Arkansas Department of Art for their Visiting Artist Lecture, a lecture made possible by the Joy Pratt Markham Visiting Artist Fund, to address their students and the community. He was also at the Washington and Lee University Department of Art for the Visiting Artist Programme, 2016.
