"Project: Seraphic Light"

If you came across a pile of stones, a small bag placed in the limbs of a tree, coins randomly tossed on a street corner, would you necessarily recognize each to be a sacred site in order to commune with the divine? The conceptual association of transcendence and art seems related to the widespread compositional mode in various Yoruba arts.

How are sacred spaces identified by a particular set of beliefs? This is thoughtfully and thoroughly explained in Dr. R.F. Thompson's "Face of the Gods." Although he focuses primarily on the altar this in itself is revealing because the focus of worship can be indoors, outdoors, or anywhere and as a locus of several media that might include natural or manmade items or, even animals.

How does one find or recognize revelatory experience in these sacred objects in which is hidden some mysterious power of belief? If one is seeking the answer through an Africentric vision, one might find some answers in the sacred oral texts of the Odu Ifa.

Within these verses are the sacred texts of the Yoruba people. The Odu point to people, places, and objects where the experience of revelation is made possible through reading people, places, and objects as visible signs of that which is hidden. A person from the city Ile-Ife, Nigeria maintain that the Odu contain four branches of knowledge: religion, history, medicine, and science. 

One's possible evolution...

This completed project is a serious attempt to write a re-evaluation of the art world's tendency to consign simple categories of difference to work that finds relevance in, and identifies with, the Black Atlantic experience. 

This is not meant as a diatribe or manifesto, but I am using the process(es) of making my art to indicate a new path in understanding the art of contemporary Black Atlantic culture. 

I am establishing a new ground in the dialogue around how and what constitutes art and its function. 

This project originally appeared on my web pages, "Olokun Art Projects", and was conceived as a way to sidestep the institutional context which many times has not been in my best interest.

... sensation, revelation, improvisation, sacrifice, path cleared, that's Ejiogbe.

Performance Meadow

Offering Bowl

Bundle Offering

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