QUEST AND VANITY

QUEST AND VANITY

Life is sustained through a perennial search for understanding the evanescent yet elusive essence of our encounters and projections. Therefore, the quest to understanding the world around us despite its transience becomes a manifold; seminal fluid for our pursuit in whatever discipline, interest and purposes Art then becomes an expressive vehicle for my investigations. I search beyond the facile from the banal or everyday used and abandoned objects of our society which present itself as anchor for my interrogation of the pulse and dynamics of my environment.

I indulge the poetry of circuit-panels as metaphor for a condensing global village and bar-codes from imported products as a collective indictment of our consumer- ready and dependent economy but i also explore the latent beauty in design elements inherent in those used and discarded objects which had once assumed itself as items of our lust and desires. Maybe I don’t know how to present a descriptive portraits of the users of those discarded items but at least I will tell a poetic story of the several hands that was in contact with them: their relationship with the products and from that point the reader of my works inquires as to who, what, when and how those items became part of us thereby triggering a new chain of consciousness while also involving the viewer within an inexhaustible mode of creativity. My use of discarded materials is not so much of re-cycling however it is giving life again or recharging and re-contextualising as poetry of resurrection

Art as I have said elsewhere should elicit feelings of newness, for life itself is a new chapter to be read firsthand in order to inspire genuine reactions toward its understanding. In my everyday pursuit for these understanding I hope to find a fresh way of expressing my impressions and what I record is just but one possibility out of thousands of millions of possibilities which can never be exhausted. In this elusive desire to make an infinite condition finite there are definitely antithetical positions that though may seem not to add cohesion to my point of view but will eventually build up into a cohesive synthesis of our collective pursuit of knowledge for the understanding and sympathy of posterity.

                                                                                                                      Ike francis

                                                                                                                     Port Harcourt 2009

 

reclining woman

 

 

still elegant

 

struggle

the struggle depicts fighting elements . entangled forms which could as well be the same self fighting with its alternate ego. its a  perpetual thing.

 

unveiling 2

now i teach drawing, mixed media and painting at the university of port-harcourt. the university is located in south,south nigeria.the textures are rich in a special way

my new works on the situation at the niger-delta will soon be posted. a little bit delay since i have to take care of my teaching responsibility. its exhilarating as well as time consuming. sometimes i fee nostalgic but painting is both art and act and the act takes less time. i appreciate your patience and will surely augment this with sharing good, topical and conceptual issues with you all.

Emergent Netizens

OF NETIZENS AND CITIZENS

These works are ideations from the architectonics of designs on radio\computer motherboards [circuit boards] as metaphor of cities and its activities in our contextual global village.  I use circuit boards as city microcosm with its concomitant changes in paradigms, shifting ethos, emergent physiognomy and attitudes. Our present experience with internet and other communication gadgets presupposes Human beings as a creature that is inextricably interwoven with gadgets he\she created as a tool for space\time transgression, hence in our contemporary world we are simultaneously individual beings as well as landscapes of our world which we traverse without barriers experienced prior to the satellite breakthrough.

There is currently an emergent international culture with passages from an old order to a new transvanguard culture where every aspect of life is appropriated as world property via the internet. The reality of the above is that we have life as ‘on line experiences;’ membership, citizenship or netizenship, food, fashion, music, university degrees, job opportunities, virtual art galleries, hobbies, schools, poems and any other aspect of human endeavours or yearnings are now ‘on line experiences’ that there exists a tin line between real life and the virtual reality which the computer is negotiating. However it will be pertinent to note that just like in the old order whereby every situation is agenda driven and so has its inherent antithesis.

                                                   

Our virtual experience being a transgression of time, speed and space is bound to be infected with those systemic viruses which threatened the former order, and in these concatenation of ideas; virtual crimes, dangerous appropriation of other cultures, imbalances in modes of participation to the global village and altering of ‘self’ is bound to spread with unprecedented speed. When in the year 2000 I saw two teenage girls and a younger boy browsing a site [penis dot com] and couldn’t comprehend such effrontery in a public place, I was cautioned by the operator of the cybercafé and such is an aspect of our globality. The good side of the coin is that we no longer have to wait for moribund mail system to take eternity to deliver our mails and in instances when I get a forwarded call for application opportunity from bisi silva I only have to apply and send on line [if applicable] to receive an acknowledgement of the receipt of my entry and the endless opportunities in learning and dissemination of knowledge which the internet had made possible. I try to document today’s experiences using materials that are vital and contextual to its beingness hence mixed media of discards from our information world comes handy and apt to combine with factory made artists medium, for me material is concept which can be used to approach issues as it affects our society. 

By trying to capture the vital essence of our information age, such discarded factory-made materials like CDs, diskettes, wires, printing foils, radio\computer motherboards, newspaper prints and other items used as accessories for internet\information dissemination are recovered from dumpsites where they have been abandoned by their last users are recovered, re-contextualized and recharged as they play in concert with improvised and factory made artists colors in the creating of arts that is not only contemporaneous or conceptual in its thematic bend but also captures my inner feelings on the present development. Interesting also is the fact that the circuit panels are actually decorated with beads that are beautiful and has a contraption that looks like cities, towns,  mountains, forests ,rivers or oceans and all that can be seen of the world from an aerial view which is incidentally what the internet is all about. The condensation of the globe to a microcosm which can be assessed in one breath, no wonder Prof. Chike Aniakor wrote that “our next door neighbours Australia is within an earshot”.  

Radio/computer motherboards: a dialogue of media and content

Art medium/material is a vehicle for an artist’s experience. Oils, acrylics, water-colours, tempera, gauche, wood, stone, concrete, dyestuff, wrought iron, metals are few among the conventional materials an artist can purchase from the open market however; the list of unconventional materials are endless and subject to the artist’s discretion and imagination. Aniakor (1999:30) describes imagination as “a form of cognitive or rational process; a free creative ordering of the content of the mind”. Imagination then becomes the core of an artist task who wants to explore the use of materials outside the conventional materials. The Dadaist upturned objects as an attack on societal axioms, while the scatological artists used feaces to express the repugnant issues of their society. The artist’s choice of material can allude to its reading of meaning, this is what Goldberg (1999:152) refers to as” an art of which the material is concept”- meaning that the material of execution is primary to its content.

As a child growing up between Lagos, Portharcourt and Oguta, the circuit board panels from radio, gramophone and its like have been an object of fantasy; for me trying to read meaning from the beautiful arrangements of beads, diotes lines, or transmitters to be metaphors for actual skyscrapers, trees, footpaths, shanties and anything that can be seen of the earth from an aerial plane. This fantasy lingered that in 1998 I wrote a poem “Ode To Oracle” which was an, exteriorization of my conclusion on the ‘computer magic’. However whether as a re-enlivened child-hood reminiscence of the radio mother-boards or an imagistic stimulation of lines from “Ode To Oracle” the circuit board series “oracle doth come” started my use of circuit panels for mixed media panels in 1999. Ideating meaning from the panels and charging them further with tube colours was encouraged by prof. C.C. Aniakor who was an active supervisor of my M.F.A Programme. From the circuit boards are to be seen a wide array of earth colours, of nuances of whites, greens, ochres, sienna and charging these colours further through the artist’s colours heightens its aesthetics and also encapsulates the idea of alter- mondialisation  (the one and the other) as a metaphor for the dictum of globalization. The meaning is that we are part of what we use just as we are part of the world we live in and any attempt to extricate one from the other result in a pyrrhic venture. In my paintings media fuse with content happy viewing. 

A GLOBAL FACE

I am a “now” artist, living today in Africa which is open to other regions of the world. I have good friends in some of these regions with constant and easy    flow of information like communicating with Marion Pancrazi in far away France without language or distance barriers. Also I stroll the streets of Nigeria scrounging, scavenging digging, picking or collecting used and refused items from sites of their last abode. Circuit Boards, CD Plates, Diskettes, Empty cans, Old newspaper/Magazine prints, Ropes, Fabrics, Condensers, Wood stumps, Copper wires have Journey their way from these dumps to my studio where they play in concert with factory made art materials to assume new life. When recharged they beat their supposed transience and can outlive its creator (the artist). My strolling the streets also take me to cyber cafes where youths and adults throng to browse the streets of far away continents through a mouse click which reminds one of columns of red cap chiefs with town folks around an obese iroko tree in a clearing within a sacred grove.

                                                 

This situation I dub “a global face of same essence and shifting forms” from the L.C.D screen of the computer monitor I can discern faces of beautiful people of the world albeit the insurgence of banal events. I see a Caucasian or African girl dress in Indian sari, a German with aso oke, wares from outermost parts of the world made accessible through the mouse click, I read about the Sioux Indians and even the different hurricanes   across America, Europe and Asia. For me the ease of information flow is first all about a new would with boundless borders in a virtual reality (not physically though). From the height of our refuse dumps one can also access our level of interaction with other parts the world. Some products are entirely new to us while some are exported in its raw state only to come back as refined products. A typical example in fashion is the “spaghetti top” which has its prototype from the Fulani. Our world is a metaphorical Global village with different sections, cities, towns, crannies, streets, foliages, waters, being condensed into a microcosm of architectonic configurations and put inside the radio/ computer as the chief Shaman of a postmodern age. In its concatenation of ideas, digital supremacy has ensured an ubiquity is carried even in our pockets wherever we are, it is in our cars, in our houses, churches and other cultural or social gatherings as GSM phones, calculators, palm tops, laptops, radio and other variants that can be found in the computer shenanigans to the extent that man becomes the whole landscape of his world. The cliché of Global village then goes beyond its vulgar use to accommodate its effect on our spirituality because we encounter new realities as ‘a thing outside of the thing’ an eucharistic metaphor with paradigmatic changes.

Art in whatever manner it is expressed should reflect the internal dynamics of its society. As an African artist from Nigeria; experiencing recent changes, it is natural to explore those realities of today’s Africa and not to shuffle my head in dunes like an ostrich. Africa is yet on a new course of transition; that of changing forms, shifting ethos, new positions, status, paradigms which presents a chimerical experience. In this rite of passage its cosmogony can also be altered but not its essence. Cultures have been known to change when it encounters other civilizations however the “danger occurs only when there is either total assimilation or cultural insularity” (Ezeh 2004:7). Knowing your identity and taking it beyond your locality is central to my themes (see Our Queen For All) Ezeh futher suggests that in our Globalization process “ any part of our human family that has something useful for the rest of the human kind must be allowed to retain and export it if need be” (lbid) Africanity in a village square can only be enhanced in an environment where we know who we are, where we are from, our present state and projections. African-ness is a totality of your being i.e. if you are from Africa and not a subject of hypocritical verbal insinuations while your attitudes, wardrobes, libraries, mannerisms are all imported outside the shore of Africa which I see as Diasporic mentality’. In my paintings (which have prevalence of faces) are to be seen “the heart-shape face trend, a typology that is spread through out sub-Sahara pre-colonial   African sculptures.

                              

In art or culture Africans have not been conservative and like the Igbos of southern Nigeria would say ‘Egbe bere-ugo bere’ let the, falcon perch, let the eagle perch” there have existed a cross-cultural fertilization in their art forms or content (See ‘Portuguese soldiers in an event Benin Arts) while being myself, an African, my orientation in art is a rejection of manmade boundaries, regions, religions, sections, Creed, Colour and all such fixations which Agbayi says “pitches man against man, they erect barricades, wall; we against you. You against them, the Oriental against the Occidental, Africans against Westerners and a most unfortunate fallout of the scramble and partition of African, Africans against Africans” (Agbayi 2004:9) from any part of the world we come from, lets live in a boundless world with inexhaustible possibilities because when the spirit is free the individual experiences total freedom.