Artist: Rikki Wemega-Kwawu
Oct 12, 2008 by
 recently at the opening for “The Poetics of Cloth: African Textiles/Recent Art” currently on view at N.Y.U. Grey Gallery until December 6th. The piece that he has in the exhibition is a hanging collage made up entirely of African phone cards. The cards struck a cord with me because they remind me of time spent abroad, trying to locate the best calling card rate, etc. The work mimics, cloth or a quilt and is a nice modern take on the eclectic assemblage of color and form that both feel nostalgic and familiar yet somewhat foreign on this side of the Atlantic. The pattern references adinkra designs which are found on cloth, walls, and pottery of the Asante tribe. Entering into the four walled projection space of artist Grace Ndiritu’s (b. 1976 Birmingham) “Still Life, 2005–7”. Rikki’s own clothing fell into the projection and for a minute the dimension of video and free-standing presence of a body in space merged into one. Grace’s video projections reveal and conceal parts of the artist herself who is wrapped in various stages of dress, the cloth originally from Mali.</p>
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I met artist Rikki Wemega-Kwawu, (b. 1959 Sekondi, Ghana) recently at the opening for “The Poetics of Cloth: African Textiles/Recent Art” currently on view at N.Y.U. Grey Gallery until December 6th. The piece that he has in the exhibition is a hanging collage made up entirely of African phone cards. The cards struck a cord with me because they remind me of time spent abroad, trying to locate the best calling card rate, etc. The work mimics, cloth or a quilt and is a nice modern take on the eclectic assemblage of color and form that both feel nostalgic and familiar yet somewhat foreign on this side of the Atlantic. The pattern references adinkra designs which are found on cloth, walls, and pottery of the Asante tribe. Entering into the four walled projection space of artist Grace Ndiritu’s (b. 1976 Birmingham) “Still Life, 2005–7”. Rikki’s own clothing fell into the projection and for a minute the dimension of video and free-standing presence of a body in space merged into one. Grace’s video projections reveal and conceal parts of the artist herself who is wrapped in various stages of dress, the cloth originally from Mali.
