Olalekan Jeyifous Nigerian
Biographie
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No Hurry In Life, 2017
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Dispatches, 2016
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Luxury Sector, 2016
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Na you dey drive, 2016
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Nothing But Water, 2016
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Lagos Makoko Canal, 2015
Olalekan Jeyifous was born in Nigeria and is based in Brooklyn, NYC. He received a BArch from Cornell University, Ithaca, USA, in which he focused particularly on computer applications. He is a fellow of the Socrates Sculpture Park, Queens, NYC, and his completed residencies include the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, the Drawing Center, the MacDowell Colony and the Headlands Center for the Arts.
Originally trained as an architect, Jeyifous uses architecture and design as tropes in his artistic practice to investigate socio-cultural and political issues from the specific angle of his diasporic position. His practice combines digital sketches and 3D computer modeling with photographs, hand drawings, collage, video installations, speculative photomontages, mobile architectural constructs and monumental sculpture.
As a Nigerian-born, American citizen, Jeyifous remembers his formative years as “marked by constantly moving and perpetually adapting to new places”. His work often responds to either the anxiety or potential of spaces, and how one navigates, maps, and perceives them. His artwork is strongly rooted in “borrowed and invented narratives” that explore comprehensive visions of urban utopias/dystopias that converge at the intersection of architecture, emerging technologies, and culture. He anchors them with direct relevance to contemporary social issues in ways that communicate their participation in, and alienation from the larger world.
His hand-cut collages on paper and wooden models developed for the “Not My Business" series, in which he uses rigorous cubist geometric shapes and intricate motifs, are inspired by a poem by Niyi Osundare and draw on current Nigerian economic and political news, Jeyifous’s private family photographs, elements of language, and personal memories. Olalekan Jeyifous refers to a Derridan ‘No longer and Not Yet Time’ in which the spectre of Modernism haunts the informal fabric of the urban landscape. In his futurist photo-collages depicting the Makoko area in Lagos, he freely juxtaposes recognizable icons of the informal economy - street vendors, industrial waste and power generators - with those of the post-colonial utopia-orderly state and social infrastructure to create strange constructions in which time and space collide ambiguously.
Olalekan Jeyifous has exhibited recently at Coachella Festival, California, and Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco. He participated in the ‘Making Africa’ exhibition first shown at the Vitra Design Museum, Germany, the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao and the Kunsthal Rotterdam, The Netherlands. His works have also been shown at venues such as MoMA, the Miami Center for Architecture and Design, Miami, and The Studio Harlem Museum, NYC, and Museum of Art, Architecture, and Technology (MAAT), Lisbon, Portugal.
Œuvres
Foires
Expositions
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State Of Flux
Works On Paper by Wura-Natasha Ogunji, Olalekan Jeyifous, Safaa Erruas & Gregory Olympio 11 Juillet - 16 Août 2019Lire plus -
The No Longer And The Not Yet: Lagos x Johannesburg
5 - 31 Juillet 201750 Golborne is delighted to present ‘The No Longer And The Not Yet: Lagos x Johannesburg’, a two-artist exhibition aiming to set up a conversation between Nigerian-born, Brooklyn- based Olalekan Jeyifous and South African Jake Singer about their respective visions of Lagos and Johannesburg.Lire plus
