People lucky enough to be able to visit Gallery 1957 in Accra, Ghana, will discover (until 22nd October) a section of the exhibition entitled "Yellow is the Colour of Water" (this is indeed a multi-site project with interventions taking place in other locations as well), featuring Jeremiah Quarshie's latest hyper-realistic paintings from his new series.
The latter features beauty pageant contestants, businesswomen, mothers to labourers sitting among yellow "Kufuor" (after John Kufuor, the second President of the Fourth Republic of Ghana) gallon containers used to store and carry water and found throughout Ghana.
The water containers act as thrones and the subjects portrayed turn into modern-day tongue-in-cheek queens, while the artist uses the set and settings of these paintings to create social contrasts, and make us ponder about the conditions of different people.
Quarshie also employs the yellow colour in a symbolical way: water is transparent but in this case it is identified with the yellow shade, almost to tell us that colours are just temporarily defining and limiting categories.
Yellow will continue to be a trademark shade for Gallery 1957 as it gets ready to take part in 1:54 Contemporary African Art Fair (6th – 9th October 2016) at Somerset House in London with a solo booth by Serge Attukwei Clottey (stand G31).
Clottey is the founder of the GoLokal collective and the creator of "Afrogallonism", an artistic concept commenting on consumption within modern Africa through the utilisation of the ubiquitous yellow gallon containers that arrive from Europe as cooking oil canisters and are then reused to store water and petrol.
Clottey started to radically transform the containers into artworks a while back and exhibited his pieces in the event "My Mother's Wardrobe", that marked the opening of Gallery 1957 in March 2016.
"My Mother's Wardrobe" was inspired by the death of Clottey's mother and by the textile traditions of Ghana. In many parts of Ghana, a person's wardrobe is released to relatives a year after their death, and quite often the children of the deceased are left with no material memories.
As an only son Clottey wove his own sculptures to celebrate and remember his mother, using plastic pieces at times decorated with barcode graphics and recreating his own version of Dutch wax textiles. Slightly reminiscent of El Anatsui's tapestries made with found materials such as discarded aluminum caps and plastic seals from liquor bottles, Clottey's works are mainly made with squares of yellow plastics.
In a special performance at the gallery in March, the artist also invited men and women dressed in their mothers' wardrobes, breaking in this way assumptions concerning gender in clothing and in life. Visitors at 1:54 will discover Clottey's wall-based sculptural installations created through cutting, drilling, stitching and melting found materials and yellow containers.
The resulting bold assemblages and collages of materials pose questions about traditions and our global consumption and waste, but they also prove that basic materials can be recycled, elevated and transformed into new and visually powerful narratives.
Expect to see fashion designers starting to mention "Afrogallonism" as an inspiration, but also Clottey's large-scale installations being used as props in catwalk shows very soon.
Image credit for this post
Images 1 to 4, Jeremiah Quarshie, "Shooter", "Eyram", "Franklina" and "Manye", "Yellow is the Colour of Water" series, 2016, Acrylic on canvas
Images 5 and 6 Gallery 1957 shows Serge Attukwei Clottey at 1:54 Art Fair, Somerset House, London, 6-9 Oct 2016.
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