Exhibition
Location
Experimental Gallery
Tjaden Hall
M–F, 8 a.m.–4:30 p.m.
Contact
Department of Art
(607) 255-6730
Reception
Wednesday, April 8, 5–7 p.m.
Related Links
Abstract
A culmination of Onome Olotu’s practice while an M.F.A. student, THIS BODY IS UNDER REVIEW is a visual and physical representation of nights and days of research, experimenting and exploring, failures and successes, and above all, FUN in the last two years. The works in this exhibition display how the body is and has been seen and disciplined within social and cultural frameworks. Through painting, drawing, ceramic, and sculptural explorations, Olotu talks about the ways bodies are celebrated, policed, reshaped, and remembered, inadvertently becoming sites for negotiation.
The images draw on archival photographs, personal histories, and cultural references, including scenes of women from Igbo August Meetings and historical imagery such as Efik women in Calabar’s colonial-era fattening rooms. By reworking these materials through layers, texture, and gesture, Olotu speaks on how historical narratives about the body continue to shape contemporary perceptions of beauty and belonging.
Biography
Onome Daniella Olotu
Onome Daniella Olotu (b. 1993, Lagos, Nigeria) is an M.F.A. candidate in Creative Visual Arts at Cornell University whose multidisciplinary practice includes personal, family, and institutional archives that explore social history, identity, and memory. Working primarily in acrylics and printmaking, recently expanded by ceramics, her “Postcard Series” draws on archival photographs and documents to re-imagine the past and futures that reckon with erasure, while her “Mask Series,” inspired by W. E. B. Du Bois’s double consciousness, confronts body dysmorphia and the politics of visibility through layers.
Olotu’s works have recently been shown across Nigeria and North America, including Being at Home in Princeton, James Hall Memorial Gallery, Princeton University; Traversing Nostalgia, Arts Council of Princeton; Sankofa: African Routes, Canadian Roots, Museum of Anthropology, University of British Columbia; and other group exhibitions at Cornell University. Her works are in the collection of the Princeton Municipality and the ProCES, Princeton University, and several private collections.
She lives and works between Ithaca, New York, and Lagos.
