Sophia-Yemisi Adeyemo

---

My work is grounded in a diasporic visual sensibility for narrative storytelling. I practice foraging history as a means of generating liberatory visions. Present/historical revolutionary movements are central to how I imagine and construct the scenes in my work. Graffiti, protest art, political posters, appliqué, and an African-diasporic decorative impulse (so-called naive art/outsider art) intertwine with my circumstantial affinity for painting as a means of contributing to a lineage of opposition. 

For a long time my work took the form of painted paper collages. But, the aforementioned act of foraging has begun to take on new material meaning, as I’ve begun collecting discarded trash-objects. I see these objects as entities; fragments of experience, rejected by-products of a capitalist use-value structure. I’ve been engaged in an animistic patience with these found object-entities, allowing the surfaces to make suggestions, and breathe through whatever decorative interventions I make.