Clamp Gallery

On View: September 17, 2021 – October 30, 2021

For this exhibition, Mikael Owunna presented ten images that extended his photographic series Infinite Essence, for which the artist leveraged his training as an engineer to build a camera flash that only transmits ultraviolet light. Owunna meticulously hand-paints the nude bodies of Black models with fluorescent paints that only glow under ultraviolet light and photographs them in total darkness. For the fraction of a second that his shutter snaps, a transfiguration happens: the Black body is illuminated as the starry universe itself. Owunna places these glowing bodies into tableaux from the archive of African diasporic myth and prints these images on aluminum sheets. The metal substrate connects the work to a deep history of African smithing traditions embodied in figures like the Igbo bronze casters of Igbo-Ukwu and Demme Na, the mythical Dogon smiths that descended from the heavens.

This exhibition also premiered the film Obi Mbu (The Primordial House) (co-directed by Mikael Owunna and Marques Redd). This work is a 30-minute experimental dance film that is centered in the Primordial House, located in the Sirius star system, from which creation emerges. Eke-Nnechukwu, the Igbo high god, and Chukwu, Her masculine counterpart, exist in perfect unity in and as the Blackness of space. Although They are dual aspects of the Primordial Androgynous deity, Chukwu sections off a part of space exclusively for Himself in the form of a sacred pillared chamber in the heart of the Primordial House. He engages in a secret work by dancing in and out of this chamber, which sets off a chain of irrevocable circumstances that lead to our current world and condition.