“Contact Merchandise” is the artist’s first present with the gallery, and can embody sculpture, video, prints, and huge scale billboard collage.

Okokon’s observe, which darts between most recognized artmaking strategies, examines the ghostly connections that kind between disparate societies beneath the auspices of shopper tradition. On this exhibition, the artist conjures a limbo-like area between the USA and Africa (largely the Gold Coast, his household’s place of birth), using disposable items which have the tendency to linger in a single’s residence, or in a single’s reminiscence, regardless of their proneness to obsolescence. These key objects—plastic sports activities trophies, low-cost vacationer souvenirs, reclaimed colonial-era sea chests, billboard fragments, and tv business clips—crackle with murmurs of an erstwhile period of fabric tradition, lengthy supplanted by newer, quicker applied sciences. These relics often take residence within the spandrels and crypts of latest tradition: within the donation bin, or on VHS tapes saved within the attic.

Utilizing the ways of The Photos Technology—of citation, excerption, framing, and staging—Okokon’s assemblage and bricolage works search to imbricate shared experiences of longing and loss from the 2 locations the place the artist claims birthright. Whereas many of those objects will strike resonant emotional chords in both American or West African viewers, the top results of every completed object entails the clashing of components from antipodal sources: the sports activities trophy segmented and rebuilt utilizing African memento collectible figurines; the clean-cut fashions of a barbershop commercial scarified with collotype printmaking; or the hyper-familiar Ghanaian billboard commercial reconstructed utilizing a mix of memento images and folktale allusions. The emotional common-denominator is a disjointedness, someplace misplaced within the transatlantic abyss, or within the wraithlike, invisible ether of wi-fi communication. Girded by the (albeit mass-produced) memento, Okokon’s artwork attracts the critique of late-stage capitalism in direction of one’s non-public life, one’s residence, one’s marrow.

“Contact Merchandise” is a model title for a few of Ghana’s hottest family cleansing merchandise—considerably akin to titling a present Lysol in Africa. Out of its native context—and for shopper ears unfamiliar to its every day use—this model title is a synecdoche for the big range of components in Okokon’s multimedia observe: it’s an paintings that traces the contours of longing in a cloth tradition that struggles to persist: the texture of carved wooden, the load of a hole trophy, or the downy sting of tv static on one’s cheek.

at von ammon co, Washington DC
till August 4, 2024