Cameron Ugbodu: See You
Doyle Wham is delighted to announce the opening of a solo exhibition of Cameron Ugbodu's work titled See You.
Cameron Ugbodu is a London-based, Austrian-Nigerian artist and curator whose practice imagines, fosters and brings to life queer, black, creative spaces, featuring symbols and characters assembled with strong storytelling elements. In this self-curated show, Ugbodu presents artworks from all his major series to date, many exhibited for the first time.
The exhibition's title, See You, is a reference to Ugbodu's own tag (the signature that artists use for art created on public surfaces), a play on his initials and the relationship between viewer and artwork. For Ugbodu, it is essential for his works to be publicly accessible and visible beyond the confines of gallery spaces. In his own words: "As a black artist, I want people outside to see our work and not have it restricted from view for only the privileged. Not everyone has the time or the resources to go to a gallery and in the gallery space you have to ask for permission to show your art.”
Five artworks from Ugbodu’s ‘New Mo(nu)ments’ series are exhibited, of which three can be found installed both within and outside the gallery space. These life-size black and white portraits are inspired by African sculptural traditions, from Benin Bronzes and Akan gold weights to traditional wood crafting techniques. These wood sculptures were the artist’s first exposure to art, when his grandfather shipped some from Nigeria to Austria as wedding gifts. Ugbodu strongly believes that these sculptural traditions belong in the public realm, and was further motivated to create and display his own ‘New Mo(nu)ments’ in the wake of political uprisings that have seen colonial statues torn down. They raise important questions about which narratives, individuals and communities are given the right to commemoration.
Ugbodu’s practice is concerned not just with representation but with reclamation. His ongoing visual research project ‘Body Studies’ offers a response to the fetishization of the black male body throughout history and photography, while ‘Masters-Teachers’, a series of self-portraiture created by Ugbodu and his mentor Campbell Addy, demonstrates the need to create safespaces and systems of mentorship for black/queer artists. This series is a manifestation of the connection between the two artists and grounds their dynamic in the rich history of artistic mentorship - most notably paying homage to Jean-Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol’s relationship and joint self-portraiture.
Ugbodu unites his unique photographic vision with a highly experimental approach to display, influenced by his family’s background in craftsmanship. The artworks range in size from miniature to 2 x 2.5 metres and are printed on a wide range of materials, from traditional Fine Art paper to wallpaper and fly posting paper, to the display of a very personal scrapbook. The artist then affixes some works to recycled shipping pallets and others to canvas stretched over wood frames, before overlaying them with stripes of paint and even incorporating fabric into the structure of the final piece, blending the worlds of photography, painting and sculpture.
