It’s important to have ur fangs out at the end of the world Precious Okoyomon
Mendes Wood DM is pleased to present It’s important to have ur fangs out at the end of the world, the first solo exhibition by Precious Okoyomon at the gallery. The show brings together new works that trace the artist’s exploration of ecosystems and dreams and how modes of relationality and belonging figure within these alternative imaginings. Through an installation comprising wallpaper, drawings, dioramas, and bears, Okoyomon stages oneiric inner worlds where the childlike and the erotic become paths to understanding how fragility can be a radical condition of care and transformation, while the structural violence of sexual shame is undone with vitality and mischief. The artist has written a new fable to accompany the exhibition.
If one were to reduce matter to its smallest unit, it would come down to particles. The most infinitesimal division, irreducible and restless. Yet, such units never exist in pure isolation. Their destiny is relational, perpetually bound into frenzied fields of vibrating forces. Even the loneliest electron will always hum inside a web of interactions, like the first hint of a vast forest sprouting in a cold spring, with the promise of opulent blossoms. To speak of particles is to speak of relation itself. They are the prologue of all beginnings, an ecosystem where nothing stands alone. At one level, this is the physics truism that “we” comes prior to “I,” with individuation taking place against a background of relations.
In his Spheres trilogy, philosopher Peter Sloterdijk approached the same question of individualism from an anthropological perspective. For Sloterdijk human beings are “spheric” creatures, embedded in microspheres of intimacy and co-existence. From the prenatal bubble of the womb to childhood attachments, to the social and collective environments one inhabits, the self is always co-constructed with the other. If physics tells us particles can only exist in relation, Sloterdijk suggests the same for the bubbles of subjectivity.
Precious Okoyomon, too, introduces round atom-like bubbles as vessels for intuitions and impressions about the I. Within them, cute, dismayed eyes seemingly tremble in front of their porous destiny. These bubbles not only project toward a boundless opening of the self as always already plural but also allow for an introspective journey embracing the same intimate nature of the sphere. Here, mischievous notes introduce a “Pleasure Island” of uninhibited bears. With shimmering eyes, glossy lips, cotton lace underwear, and cuddly paws, they wink hilariously, disclosing an inner world where delight reigns voracious. There is something perversely childish about them. Free from all that is repressed, they compose their fantasies. Of milk, honey, flowers, and love. Their bodies touch earth, while their asses praise the sky, utterly open to abandonment. Vulnerable, like their overexposed orifices, but protected from external interaction, be it with a net or the glass of a diorama. Their intimacies and soft-core erotic visions can only be observed, not participated.
Like Winnicott’s “transitional object,” [1]Okoyomon’s bears embody the space between the projection of selfhood and the transition to everything that lies outside. As any cuddly toy a child holds dear, they become a relational tool. In a way, Okoyomon’s ever-present bears are a testament to how each of us relates to the outer world through intimate inner worlds that we inhabit and depend upon, with the constitution of our inner worlds changing as we make our way through the outer world. It’s not a case of rejecting introspection in order to take action in daily life but rather introspectively orienting ourselves toward our place within the world, under the certainty that the I is always plural. Thus personal and historical traumas exist as collective wounds to be consciously transformed through compassion. These are tackled in parallel to ecological collapse and colonial extraction, observing the resilience of nature as an applicable model. The violence of history is internalized consciously, in collective mourning and empathic strength of spirit.
The orgiastic dimension of Okoyomon’s practice can be interpreted in multiple ways. There is an element of deviation that breaks the notion of innocence, mere religious construction as much as any pastoral representation of nature detached from reality as only the human can be. There is also an element of self-obliteration in the other, or openness toward the destructive drive of nature. The artist has often proven their love for poisonous gardens that devour as much as they nurture. They stage rampant ecosystems where identity, colonial history, spirituality, collectivity, things, and the living environment tangle in systems that are constantly made and unmade. Fragilization, a notion borrowed from artist Bracha Ettinger, is central to Okoyomon’s celebration of the condition of being in relation, vulnerable to transformation and to nature’s destructive forces. There’s violence yet liberation in this fragility.
There is also an apocalyptic feeling to the whole, perhaps enhanced both by the religious references and the presence of flames in some of the drawings. It’s a Judgment Day. A conjunction with the sky, conveniently Okoyomon’s favorite place. From a particle’s point of view, any act of creation implicates the end of the world.
As for academic Christina Sharpe’s book Ordinary Notes – another important reference for the artist – where fragmentation becomes a method and a proposal, an alternative to elaborate, eddying back and forth between cruelty and care, sorrow and joy, Okoyomon’s works serve sacredness in the chaotic mess of desire, under the logic that love is an exercise of fragilization as well as an exorcism. A pulverization in essence, a letting go.
[1] Donald W. Winnicott’s concept of the “transitional object” (introduced in Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena, 1951, later in Playing and Reality, 1971) describes soft objects (like blankets or teddy bears) that allow the child to bridge between inner psychic experience and external reality.
