PRECIOUS OKOYOMON’S Every Earthly Morning the Sky’s Light touches Ur Life is Unprecedented in its Beauty represents the artist and poet’s most ambitious installation to date. This unique eighteen- month commission at the Aspen Art Museum, organized by curator- at-large Claude Adjil, will feature the institution’s rooftop reimagined with each passing season. The project furthers Okoyomon’s ongoing investigation into the ways in which the miracles and terrors of our natural world have been indexed into strictly policied and racialized categories. For the summer, Okoyomon has collaborated with local growers to construct a garden that celebrates the abundance and mutability of plant life while challenging the taxonomies we impose onto it by combining invasive plants such as Japanese knotweed and honeysuckle alongside those indigenous to the region like dandelions, mugwort, and milk thistle. The exhibition presents a major new sculpture cast in concrete titled My heart makes my head swim (ditto, ditto battle angel) after a line from post-colonial theorist Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin White Masks . The winged figure’s features have been borrowed from the caryatids on the facade of the Our Lady of Victories Cathedral in Dakar, Senegal. Smaller ceramic angels and tiles are nestled throughout the garden to guide and ground visitors along their journey. Collectively these figures constitute an artwork titled Ojujokuruju, a Urhibo word from the Urhobo delta state that directly translates to past darkness and means spirit or ghost. A stream of black algae water courses through the grounds endlessly hydrating the garden. Okoyoman and jazz musician Gio Escobar of the ensemble Standing On the Corner have collaborated to produce a system of cassette tape loops burrowed into the garden that will continuously compose and recompose a chaotic randomized symphony giving voice to the universal hum of plants. Okoyomon makes visible the geological processes and reminds us that we are constantly living in a state of rebirth and will be developing and transforming the installation over its entire eighteen- month duration, making it a live and responsive commission that will literally grow and replenish over time featuring a series of offerings with various collaborators. To celebrate the passing of one season to the next, Okoyomon will hold services on the solstices. These rituals will focus on self- fragilization, the miracles of ecological terror, and the importance of building new portals.
LIST OF WORKS
My heart makes my head swim (ditto, ditto battle angel) 2021. Concrete, wire, blood Ojujokuruju 2021. Red clay, black glaze, wire To see the earth before the end of the world 2021. Clay MYSTERIUM PHYTOGEOGRAPHICUM 2021. Audio Gio Escobar and Precious Okoyomon
PRECIOUS OKOYOMON (b. 1993) is a poet and artist living in New York City. They have had institutional solo exhibitions at the LUMA Westbau in Zurich (2018), the MMK in Frankfurt (2020), Performance Space New York (2021), as well as major performances commissioned by the Serpentine Galleries, London (2019) and the Institute of Contemporary Art, London (2019). Their second book But Did U Die? is forthcoming from Serpentine and Wonder Press in 2021. They are the recipient of the 2021 Frieze Artist Award. Standing On The Corner is an Earth-based art ensemble founded in 2016 by Shamel Cee Mystery, aka Gio Escobar, that functions best in Brooklyn, New York. Inspired by, made for, and consisting of the resilience and upheaval of all people of the African diaspora, Standing On The Corner thrives in fugitivity. They can appear on any particular night as the beat of one drum, as an orchestra of 30, or as a ghost entirely, but are always on the run. The ensemble produces musical, visual, and experiential works that equate hyperlocal incidence to cosmological wisdom. Visiting sites of emotional resonance under the weight of subjective histories and traumas, the art ensemble seeks to uncover the mysteries and the ghosts of hidden truths through focused interpretation.
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