Kambui Olujimi WALK WITH ME
September 12, 2020 - January 24, 2021
Project for Empty Space is pleased to present a solo exhibition of works by Artist In Residence, Kambui Olujimi, entitled WALK WITH ME. This is the first exhibition held in PES’s new home in Downtown Newark, and kicks off our 10th anniversary celebration! The exhibition was on view to the public through January 24th, 2021.
WALK WITH ME is a collection of nearly 200 ink-wash portraits on paper by Kambui Olujimi. These works are all derived from a single photograph taken in the late 1950s, of Ms. Catherine Arline, who was the artist's longtime mentor, friend, and guardian angel. These works are a posthumous and bittersweet homage to a woman who had a profound impact on both Olujimi and his childhood community in Bedford Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. Of the work he says: “For more than the last five years, I have created more than 200 paintings from a photograph of her when she moved to New York at 18-years-old. Flattened by grief the work became a place of both healing and sharing time with her. The word engages in the process of remembering, forgetting, and mythologizing.”
WALK WITH ME is not only an homage to a single person; but also an exploration of constructing memory, monumentality, and even myth pulls together two important ideas that the artist has been working on over the past several years. “These portraits slide in and out of fidelity and accurate rendering, alternating between gestural watery movements and tight "faithful" renderings. The collection offers no truths. Their origin remains elusive, blurring between the latent images we create images between each work, leaving us to build and rebuild each memory in between each retelling.” It is an exploration of loss, love, and how we create memorials through moments and talismans. On a micro level, it explores an individual methodology of grief and remembrance. On a macro scale, the exhibition questions how we collectively preserve memory through monuments.
In addition to the exhibition, PES is pleased to present a limited edition catalog examining this series of work. This art book contains a selection of texts by Christopher Myers and Jasmine Wahi that pertain to the conceptual, visual, and personal reflections on WALK WITH ME. A signed limited edition of this book will be available throughout the exhibition.
About the Artist
Kambui Olujimi was born and raised in Bedford Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. He received his MFA from Columbia University School of the Arts and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Olujimi works within the realm of ideas rather than within an exclusive medium. Although he has directed a great deal of work in film, his is truly a multi-media practice. He crafts potent social commentary complicates and reconsiders established modes of thinking that have morphed into what commonly function as "inevitabilities." This pursuit takes shape through interdisciplinary bodies of work that investigate these phenomena from multiple angles of inquiry. His work manifests collective psychic space as a means of investigating social practices, policies, and exchanges. Olujimi is interested in the seamless process of synthesizing invisible constructs into inevitabilities. He excavates the language and aesthetics of social, historical, and cultural conventions and brings them out of the world of the implicit. Once given gravity, weight, and shape it becomes possible to reveal their incongruities and their illusory nature.
This residency was made possible in part by a generous grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.
AIR Kambui Olujimi was also featured in a New York Times article which you can read here.