On behalf of her first solo exhibition in Paris, The Poetics of Space, ruby onyinyechi investigates space and ways of presentation and display. She has designed the frames and plinths, in desire to further emulate her interest in an architectural dimension, beyond the paper and plane.
The artist engages with seven recurring elements in her drawings: birds, bikes, architecture, ada (an alien), audre (a hybrid leopard), swimming pools (also an architecture) and the paper itself. This cohort defines the work, and every drawing becomes a group of interactions: this one will involve audre, a swimming pool and birds. In another, ada takes front and centre, the birds are background. When drawing, onyinyechi moves these figures, or some of them, around, exploring the relationships between them, real or perceived space and forms of proximity between things.
ruby onyinyechi’s process is oriented by movement and by the artist’s relationship to the paper, placed on the floor in amanze’s Philadelphia studio, with the artist moving along its side, edges, corners shifting its direction, reconfiguring. She looks for balance, but also for something that would break it, an offness she enjoys. With this way of working, the focus, onyinyechi says, is mapped out for her. Why these seven elements? They hint at myth and legend, at presence and representation, at the history of art and a sense of place that isn’t specific but is still very well defined. The world onyinyechi makes is populated. The question is how it moves.
Excerpt from text by writer and art critic Orit Gat, "I’ll See You in Time and Space".
Courtesy of Mariane Ibrahim.
