Kambui Olujimi: Zulu Time exhibition catalog

25 wheat-paste sheets form a complex, nearly pulsating, image of
outer space, including abundant stars and galaxy clusters. Titled
The Black That Birthed Us (2017), this work gives a fresh and vast
meaning to the idea of blackness, which is now linked with the
universe. One work is from Earth, the other is cosmic, and both evince
eternal cycles of creation and destruction, cohesion and entropy.
In addition to Olujimi’s surprising connection with the
19th century nature-based view of the sublime, he also, surprisingly,
connects with Transcendentalist poet and philosopher Ralph Waldo
Emerson (1803–1882). Emerson advocated immersive experiences
in nature that could then be channeled into writing and art; this
directive greatly inspired many of the preeminent landscape painters
of his day. Olujimi’s immersive experiences are not with nature per
se, but instead with mediated nature, and many of his works offer
a mediated sublime, including his wonderful iceberg sculptures.
Icebergs fascinate us, in part, because such a small part of
the whole structure is normally visible above the surface of the water.
Olujimi’s iceberg sculptures from the series InDecisive Moments (2017),
meticulously crafted from glass and with hourglass shapes, are based
on photographs of icebergs that show both their protruding tops and
their great, looming, underwater bulk. Things overt and hidden,
nature and technology, photography and sculpture, abstraction and
representation all conjoin with talismanic force in Olujimi’s small glass
sculptures. The hourglass shape is also telling, and ominous. Global
warming is likely the most pressing issue facing the world today, as
icebergs break off from Greenland and Antarctica. As gorgeous as
they are, and as seductive, Olujimi’s iceberg sculptures constitute a
warning. Time to address this impending ecological crisis is running
out. Time is running out as well on the anthropocentric fantasy that we
humans—comparatively recent additions to a planet more than four
billion years old—are somehow above nature, or masters of nature.
Addressing handcuffs and icebergs, rocket disasters, a housing
complex, costume jewelry, outer space, climate change, and chandeliers,
Kambui Olujimi is obviously a questing artist intent on making
his own refreshingly idiosyncratic way and pursuing his own wideranging
interests and obsessions. As such, he again connects with the
visionary Emerson. “Art is the path of the creator to his work,” Emerson
enigmatically wrote in his 1844 essay “The Poet.” For Emerson, art
is not the finished painting, sculpture, or drawing; photograph or glass
object; performance or musical score, but instead the comprehensive
path that leads to all of those things: the artist’s individual way of
working, thinking and being. This exhibition reveals that Olujimi
is clearly on a path that matters, and that he is living, as opposed to
just making, a spirited, challenging, and altogether compelling art.
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