Roberts Tasks is happy to current Between Two Suns, a solo exhibition of latest work by Chicago-based artist Luke Agada. As if mapping the blurred and sinewy terrain of his psyche, Agada paints in pursuit of visualizing the “third house”: an inside precipice at which interdependent forces of tension, bravery, stability, chaos, survival and collapse should be wrestled with. In a palette harking back to the rusted rooftops, rugged roads and gleaming solar of his native dwelling in Lagos, Nigeria, the artist carves lithe, liminal varieties—psychological and spatial abstractions—that depict the stress between reminiscence, expertise and concept. By way of his observe, Agada dissects the anatomy of adaptation, pictorial planes whereby his particular person research of complicated sociopolitical programs seeds chimerical visions of migratory our bodies.
Agada was launched to the idea of “third house” by way of the writings of postcolonial theorist Homi Okay. Bhabha, an Indian scholar born within the mid-twentieth century who argues that every particular person exists as a singular hybrid of id elements akin to ancestry, geography, and authority—compounding elements that form the consciousness of the colonizer and the colonized. Infusing this sociological phenomenon with literary and scientific voices—from Chinua Achebe’s Issues Fall Aside to Charles Darwin’s concept of pure choice—Agada’s compositions articulate the relentless bodily and psychic transit that migrants endure. Every brushstroke displays the pressure of striving to determine a way of place and concurrently sustaining a connection to homeland, all whereas going through the limitless obstacles imposed by a capitalist, globalized society.
On this painterly iteration of “third house,” Agada develops a visible vocabulary that fuses surrealist ideation, automatist course of and abstract-expressionist gesture. Simply as he resists concrete references to his theoretical influences, he aspires to distill the constellation of archival images, diaristic writing, historic painters and acquainted landscapes that orbit his thoughts as he works—looking for varieties that think about, relatively than clarify, the feel of sensations like rigidity and transition. He embraces a inventive methodology that prioritizes his expressive freedom and accepts the restrictions of his medium to completely talk the intricacies of his conceptual visions. Agada’s scenes occupy a fractured axis, a destabilizing void whereby he seeks to reconcile fluctuating hierarchies of belonging.
The exhibition’s title, Between Two Suns, refers back to the artist’s devotion to meditating within the second of suspension, negotiating the distortions that emerge from unjust programs of labor, class and energy. By depicting states of mimicry, camouflage, and metamorphosis with out the context of a exact physique or place, Agada’s work are rooted within the undefined terrain of the “alien”—each looking for and repelling assimilation inside a dominant tradition. As Agada sees it, “Dwelling ‘between two suns’ is a continuing pursuit of steadiness that may solely be achieved by steady motion. Nothing is ever actually in a state of relaxation; it’s a regulation of nature.”