Commonwealth and Council

Idiom

David Alekhuogie

Images

Commonwealth and Council presents Idiom, a new group of works by David Alekhuogie that probes the contextual and aesthetic capacities of language, image, and body to show the ambivalence of synecdoche: compressing meaning into memes and slogans while creating a site for new meanings to emerge. Alekhuogie examines the memetic propagation of certain concept-phrases, particularly in the vernacular surrounding politics and identity, to locate the point at which constant reiteration begins to blur meaning—and where these elisions may provoke new potentialities. 


A series of canvas prints documents Alekhuogie’s tattoos—two phrases that have become codified in popular speech: “THINGS FALL APART” and “BLACK OWNED BUSINESS.” The former is the title of a novel by postcolonial author Chinua Achebe, who borrowed the line from William Butler Yeats’ poem “The Second Coming.” Alekhuogie is interested in how this parcel of language operates as a vector, manipulated by each contextual shift to generate urgency. The phrase “things fall apart” (along with its companion phrase in Yeats, “the center cannot hold”) has long been used to inject apocalyptic ardor into gloomy prognostications of widespread social malaise and ruin. Alekhuogie enacts a precarious new physical and psychological transposition, inscribing into his own skin the paradoxical fascination with doom and death that always seems to accompany assertions of Black life and resistance, in all the graphic footage of protests and police brutality that run in constant counterpoint to the declaration Black Lives Matter. 


The second tattoo, spanning Alekhuogie’s lower back, reads “BLACK OWNED BUSINESS”—ironic commentary on the economies of labor (emotional, artistic, and otherwise) that Black artists contend with, and a play, too, on the oft-repeated line, ostensibly stamped at the end of an ad or affixed to a storefront window to hype Black entrepreneurialism but in practice, more often a desperate plea for patronage, or cover against street violence. Again, the body/ground and photographic image provide an arena for deliberate recontextualization: body as business, cog in an economic machine fuelled by rampant exploitation and consumerism. Its declaration of ownership references not only the branding of human chattel slaves but also cicatrization practices in Black fraternities, the latter of which functions as a mark of immanent kinship. In performing this branding upon himself, Alekhuogie questions the moral and social utility of these signifiers, positioning digestible identifications at the fraught nexus of power, nuance, and ethical obligation. The canvases’ textured surface merges uncannily with Alekhuogie’s skin, bordered by sagging pants, forming a blended plane which bears meanings that impress not only upon images, but lives. These new works conclude his Pull_up series (2017–22), investigating the Black body and its accumulated aesthetic signs as a contested site.


David Alekhuogie (b. 1986, Los Angeles, CA; lives and works in Los Angeles, CA) received his MFA from Yale University and post-bac BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Alekhuogie’s multidisciplinary art practice centers around photography and examines the dialectical relationships between politics, race, gender, media, and power. He has had solo exhibitions at Yancey Richardson, New York (2021); Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery (2019); Company Gallery, New York (2019); Skibum MacArthur, Los Angeles (2017); and the Chicago Artist Coalition (2016). Alekhuogie has participated in group exhibitions at MoMA, New York (2020); Edward Cella Art and Architecture, Los Angeles (2019); The High Museum, Atlanta (2017); Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco (2015); and Regen Projects, Los Angeles (2015). His work has been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Time Magazine, Timeout, Chicago, Vice, and The Los Angeles Times. He is the recipient of the Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Artist Grant (2019).