Wura-Natasha Ogunji-2011

This exhibit will feature paintings and videos based on performances by the artist. Ogunji uses physical actions of the body to explore her connections to place, land, history and memory. In her performance videos, she uses her body to understand and experience acts of return and recollection. Her current video works portray the journey of a Nigerian Ife head artifact who longs for her descendents in the Americas. Ogunji paints her face to suggest the striations of this artifact and then makes the difficult attempt to fly across the land in search of history and a future. Her stop-motion animation techniques give the viewer a sense of strained movement and flight. Ogunji’s paintings speak of a similar journey between physical and spiritual planes or into the past and the future. She paints gestural figures which she then overlays with drawings of Ife heads. These white charcoal and graphite heads hover above oceans and between worlds.