Taking it’s title from Stevie Wonder’s album, this exhibition is the first in the avant-garden series, a composition of exhibitions and events exploring our surroundings and the [non-human] perspectives of plants, animals, earth, architecture and atmosphere.

Rahima Gambo brings her Abuja-based a walk series to Lagos.  This work centers around daily explorations of the environment which then become sculptures comprised of text, drawing, photography, natural and found objects. For this exhibition the artist's daily walks will be remembered through site-specific sculptures installed as a temporary archive of her movements through the city. Beginning her first walk on the day of the exhibition opening, and culminating the project ten days later gives viewers a look into an ongoing process of gathering, making and activating space.

VIVID SEAMS is a performance archive that locates and memorializes black migration patterns from the south to the west in the United States. Through sculpture, site-specific installation, and sound Adee Roberson explores the profundity of black movement and the un/making of home. For this installation, the performance archive will be in conversation with environment, plants and the landscape of Lagos. Environments and kin from New Orleans, Louisiana; Pensacola, Florida; and Los Angeles, California are transmitted across the Atlantic ocean via moving image as type of future/past time travel, and ceremony of ancestral memory.y you tell your story online can make all the difference.

Interview with Adee Roberson for The Treehouse, October 2018

Wura-Natasha Ogunji: I know your sound work a bit and also your drawings and wall pieces. Can you talk about the intersection of the music and your visual art?

Adee Roberson: I have always made music and art simultaneously. I use each as a way to transmute different energies. Since my experience as human is so intersectional (ie being black, queer, working class, etc) it feels only natural for my art practice to be a reflection of those intersections. And recently creating more installations as a practice has been a way to bring everything together, to create an atmosphere of my experience.

WNO: What was your process for creating the video VIVID SEAMS? How did that come about?

AR: I created Vivid Seams while doing the Artist in Residence Program at Echo Park Film Center. I had never really worked on video by myself before so I wanted to do the residency as a way to expand my practice. I had been in conversations with my friend Essence Harden about experimental video, and creating abstract work, and performance archive about Blackness and landscape and space. So she helped me write my proposal and do a call out for people to be in the piece.

WNO: Can you talk more about black migration? I think for us here in Lagos it would be interesting to hear about your thinking as you conceptualized the work. Why these particular places? 

AR: I can really only speak of black migration here in the states. On a timeline that starts with my enslaved ancestors being taken from West Africa across the Atlantic ocean. Some people being brought to the southern “states”, a forced migration. Migrations north and west for freedom, and jobs, was and is something that is constantly happening. So I wanted Vivid Seams to be a sort of performance/ritual honoring and speaking to that. I was thinking “what colors and sound does that movement look like?”. Since I moved to Los Angeles, but grew up in South Florida I wanted there to also be a sort of landscape document of that experience. So I chose historically and personally significant sites, to capture via moving image, that would encompass that feeling.

WNO: I like how you talk about creating 'an atmosphere of (your) experience'. The first thing I noticed in the video was the bubble form that moves through the trees, the landscape. It made me think about how home and homeland are always in flux. We often have an idea that our origins are fixed, but often, when you begin to dig down into those histories you find quite a few glitches and non-linear narratives. The one consistency is that wherever you go, there you are, as they say. My question is about the title now. Can you speak about that?

AR: Yes! I agree.The title came about because of a dream I had. In the dream an aunt of mine, who passed away, presented me with this quilt made of my ancestors hair and faces. It was so many people! Some recognizable and some not. In the dream she wrapped the quilt around me and told me it was for protection. So when I think about (my) atmosphere and practice I see all of the parts as pieces of a quilt really. The SEAMS being what connects all the stories of home and place. They connect to create a whole map, that is non- linear narrative. Something I love about working with video and film is that it can really hold all of those elements. Sound, color, light, textile, emotions, movement, humans, and plants.

WNO: When we were creating the installation and having conversations about how you wanted it to look (since you are in Los Angeles), you spoke about mirrors and this orange diamond in relationship to a portal. I'd love to hear more about how you understand and use the portal in your work. Does it come up in other pieces as well? 

AR: I love the colors orange and gold right now. They are the colors of the sun, and the crystal citrine which is about manifestation, creativity, and abundance. The colors combined with the mirrors opposite of the projection felt like a way to create this type of protection portal. I’d like to think that my paintings could also sometimes be portals to black liberation.

WNO: Lastly, what are you working on now?

AR: I have a residency coming up in Amsterdam, where I will be doing sound healing performance/workshop with my friend, the performance artist keyon gaskin. After that I am headed to Carrizozo, New Mexico for a two week residency where I hope to make an abundance of work for my first solo exhibition that will happen sometime in the spring of 2019.

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