SF/Arts Curator Insight

Dieudonne Djiela Kamgang's mural-sized painting at the gallery's entrance announces this exhibition's main themes in one complex tableaux. A young boy wearing a VR headset, clothed in a London T-shirt and jeans, is seated on the lap of a hidden figure, reclining on a wicker throne covered in traditional fabric prints. Women seated to his left and right hold cans of soup, labels forward. Other figures are either crating or uncrating a collection of traditional sculptures. A host of exchanges (cultural, social, political, artistic, historical, economic) occur simultaneously. Worlds collide, symbols migrate, new realities are born. Similar mashups are sutured with blue jeans and branded totes in Ange Arthur Koua's quilts. Discarded fabrics circumnavigate the globe, eventually getting stitched into fresh cultural artifacts. These artists "treat materials not as neutral supports, but as charged carriers of meaning." My favorite representation of this practice is Gerald Chukwuma's "The Ice, the Water and the Fire," a multi-panel carved-wood construction adorned with pounded metal shapes, which were once Pepsi cans, now transformed into fine art.