‘Artist presents Unknown Pleasures & Competing Tendencies at solo exhibition’

The exhibition featured a diverse range of materials including large-scale installation and several new cycles of paintings that were created in the last couple of years, all of which represent new approaches in the technical and conceptual development of Dike’s artistic understanding. “Through assemblage of strategies that distort, complicate or rupture prevailing associations with discarded […]

The exhibition featured a diverse range of materials including large-scale installation and several new cycles of paintings that were created in the last couple of years, all of which represent new approaches in the technical and conceptual development of Dike’s artistic understanding.

“Through assemblage of strategies that distort, complicate or rupture prevailing associations with discarded and synthetic materials—such as industrial printing plates, marine wood, acrylic, and polyurethane, among others—Dike’s recent installations fabricate new narratives that foreground unexpected connections between disparate concepts such as textile traditions, abstraction, craft, industrial design and consumerism,” Antawan Byrd curator of the exhibition said.

Byrd further noted that Dike’s artworks oscillate between cultural, personal and political spaces, with the effect of a complex picture of meaning wherein both the past and present are made visible through a rigorous engagement with process and materiality.

According to Byrd, Dike’s artworks eschew figuration and illustrative narratives, and blurring the media boundaries between collage, painting, installation and sculpture which disrupt the present terms upon which painting is conceived today, especially within the context of contemporary art practices in Nigeria.

While speaking on what motivated her to produce Unknown Pleasures & Competing Tendencies, Dike, a 1984 graduate of University of Nigeria, said she was moved by the need to give bearing to Nigerian visual culture.

“I was motivated by an experimental approach to Art making. I am using Unknown Pleasures & Competing Tendencies to re-affirm my belief in devising unique strategy of repurposing objects troves in ways that reconfigure their signifying logic and challenge their aesthetic limitations. I’ve tried to expose the parallels between process and materiality, just as I explore the possibilities of locally-sourced materials, forcing into question their bearings on Nigerian visual culture,” Dike said.

The solo-exhibition, which is to run till March 26, 2012 at the museum, also includes a selection of heavily textured and deeply lyrical abstract acrylic on canvas paintings that take the story and elaborate process of their experimental making as the works’ dominant narrative.

Unknown Pleasures & Competing Tendencies were the latest piece of art works from Dike as she has in the past featured in more than 60 solo and group exhibitions both in Nigeria and abroad. Her other solo exhibitions include Waka-Into-Bondage: The Last 3/4 Mile, Centre for Contemporary Art, Lagos (2008) and Tapestry of Life: New Beginnings, National Museum Lagos, Onikan (2008). The solo exhibition has received the support of the Centre for Black and African Arts and Civilization (CBAAC), Lagos.