By Henry Akubuiro
The fabric of the city yields a luxuriant glow on the potent canvas of a master artist. The grey of the atmosphere and cacophony of voices responding to mirth and despair are just given. So are the tears and the hopes that intertwine our breath. They all lend different perspectives to the artist to see the city dwellers. There are even more.
High-flying Nigerian artist, Uchay Joel Chima, will from Saturday, April 3rd, 2025, show his class at Alexis Galleries, located at 282 Akin Olugbade St, Victoria Island, Lagos, hold a two-week solo exhibition, welding different strands that define city people under the theme, “City Dwellers”.
The artist said, “I will be telling stories with things that are happening. A friend of mine came from California and was telling me how the Hollywood Hill was burnt down. I said, I have to represent these things with my works. For years I have been talking about the need for us to take care of our environment. When people talk about global warming and climate change, these things are real.”
Chima is an internationally acclaimed artist known for incorporating and upcycling everyday, consumable materials —from rice sacks, aluminum drinks cans, and burnt wood —into his work. He sees himself as a global artist. Hence: “I have done shows in many countries like America. I have lived in those places. I have done residency programmes in those places. I have a global view of things, and climate change is not a regional problem, it’s a global environmental problem.” This explains his fascination with the California fire disaster that happened not too long ago.
Patty Chidiac Mastrogiannis
Founder, Alexis Galleries, said at a media preview of the exhibition, kick-starting tomorrow, said City Dwellers would be featuring recent mixed-media paintings from the artist. Chima’s works are often derived from upcycling everyday consumer materials, including rice sack, aluminum canned drinks, burnt wood; experimenting with found objects such as thread and wax, sand, copper wire and charcoal.
His mixed-media works explore the dynamic preoccupation of city people and their built-in hybrid environment, inviting viewers to engage in the daily realities and routine of contemporary urban culture. Mastrogiannis added that the exhibition enjoins “us to reflect on the demands of social realities and complexities of urbanized city living, which is showcased through the artist’s nuanced use of domesticated and intimate materials synonymous with the notion of transformation, regeneration and the human community within our material spaces.”
In his curatorial statement, Uche Obasi described “City Dwellers” as an intimate reflection of urban life through the inventive mix-media techniques. Through a process of deconstruction and reconstruction, he transforms these materials by burning, restoring, and reinventing them into the manifold and duality of meanings, to engage with the idea and agency of transformation, regeneration, and community.
Navigating between meditative and transformative phases for Chima enables him to reimagine and transmute the familiar into socially engaged art, enabling him to associate the complexities of the human experience from people absorbed with the daily routine of city life to the untold challenges of urbanization.
This exhibition invites viewers to connect with the global realities of urbanization, the weighty emotions, and the urgency of social and economic impositions and dispositions of city dwellers within their lived experiences and built hybrid environments. Chima’s work invites us to reconsider our roles and relationships within the cultural landscape of urban living.
One of his paintings entitled ‘Committee of Friends’, rendered with thousands of interlocked threads and knitted ropes glued on a surface, shows an impression of lush-like vegetated background and foreground, dripped in olive color and a contrast of intense orange color of abstracted silhouetted figures in an unending conversation. It explores social cohesion and belonging within an ever-busy urban settlement.
“City Dwellers I” and “City Gate II” are two large-scale paintings of China that are enticing to behold. In City Gate,” Chima deploys clustered grids of burnt charcoal glued and joined across seven unified panels. This reflects the unfortunate devastation caused by a raging inferno that burnt down popular California cities, including Hollywood Hills, Palisades, Eaton, and Hurst, reducing them to a crucible of ashes. It x-rays the complexities and fragility of human conditions across urban cities and communities worldwide.
Rendered with faint, milkish acrylic colour on a heavily draped rice sack surface, the work leaves a contour of protruding forms and embedded threads, with dragged lines of ropes that shows four figures – three women closely and affectionately leaning toward one man – addresses the realities of city women in an unceasing exploration and pursuit of an easier life and recourse. Part of the exhibited works also include “The City was Burnt Down”, “Neighbourhood Gist”, “Spirit of Dance”, and “Invitation to Dance.”
The exhibition invites us to ponder the coercive forces of socio-economic realities and complexities of urbanized city culture while reflecting on Chima’s layered use of intimate and domesticated materials. Working at the intersection of discarded material recomposition and community reorientation, Chima’s works gives agency to transformation and regeneration on the human condition within our increasingly material spaces.
Chima is the founder of Museum of Contemporary Art, Lagos, (MoCA), established in 2018.
He studied Painting, from the Art School of the Institute of Management and Technology in Enugu, Nigeria, graduating in 1997. He has exhibited works in prominent galleries and Museums around the world, including Nigeria, South Africa, Canada, Sweden, Germany, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and the United States.
The artist was selected for the 2015/2016 Platteforum Artist Residency program in Denver, Colorado, where he was among the four artists chosen through a competitive internationally juried process. In 2014, he was an artist in residence at Vermont Studio Center, Johnson, Vermont, United States, Spark Box Studio in Ontario, Canada, 2014 and at the One Minute Foundation in Amsterdam, Netherlands in 2010.
In 2016, he was invited by the University of Arkansas Department of Art for their Visiting Artist Lecture, a lecture made possible by the Joy Pratt Markham Visiting Artist Fund, to address their students and the community. He was also at the Washington and Lee University Department of Art for the Visiting Artist Programme, 2016. He currently maintains a studio in Lagos, Nigeria, where he also directs the Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA).