David Alekhuogie

Yancey Richardson Gallery is pleased to present Naïveté, an exhibition of new photographs, collage and fabric sculptures by Los Angeles-based artist David Alekhuogie. Informed by his 2019 trip to Nigeria, the birthplace of his father, Alekhuogie’s recent work incorporates African sculpture and textiles to question the route through which African Americans become cognizant of their cultural heritage, authorship, and the hierarchy of art versus craft. A selection of works from the artist’s 2018 series To Live and Die in LA will be featured in the project gallery. This is the artist’s first exhibition with the gallery. 

In the photographic series “A Reprise”, Alekhuogie proposes a rewriting of Perfect Documents, the exhibition catalogue of documentary photographs of African sculptures by Walker Evans. Alekhuogie has recast Evans’s two-dimensional images as physical sculpture, photographed them against traditional African textiles, and then overlaid this image onto the original catalogue. The resulting photographs oscillate between object and print, two and three dimensions, and nod to Cubism’s relationship to African sculpture. The images by Evans are the result of a commission from MoMA to document their 1935 exhibition African Negro Art, a forerunner in presenting African objects as artworks rather than anthropological artifacts. With many of the objects unable to travel, Evans’s formal, modernist photographs subsequently toured as an exhibition throughout the United States in their stead. Through his own transmutation of these images, Alekhuogie brings what he calls “the hand-me-down nature of Pan Africanism” to the foreground, and questions through whose eyes, and whose agency, African Americans form their cultural narrative.

Alongside these works, Alekhuogie explores the relationship between photography and African textiles as forms of craft and storytelling. In Seamstress and Pure Life, two multi-panel collages, black and white street-style photographs float on the floral ground of a typical African wax print fabric. Like photographs, African wax prints are a visual medium, conveying stories to the viewer about both the maker and the wearer. Portrait for George,a series of fabric wall sculptures, intertwines photography and textiles. By combining landscape photographs of George’s Kenyan homeland and a Shuka cloth design typical of the area, Alekhuogie pays tribute to his friend by creating a commemorative portrait fabric. Draped and pinned within birch plywood boxes, the “portraits” conflate sculpture, photography, and performance to conjure the essence of his subject.