Onome Olotu: All About That Bass
This event has passed.
image / provided
Inspired by W. E. B. Du Bois's concept of double consciousness and my sister's navigation of body shaming and dysmorphia, this expanded "Mask Series" examines the internal conflict of viewing oneself through a dominant culture's distorted lens. The figures' distorted proportions and blurred contours mirror the tension of being hyper-visible yet unseen. Using layering and screen-printing, I create layered textual elements onto surfaces, similar to revealing and concealing memories and trauma that we try so hard to hide.
This exhibition, All About That Bass, talks about the politics of big bodies, hidden identities, and the ways in which fatness is read and exaggerated in visual culture. Through these paintings, I am looking at how large bodies carry histories of resilience while also confronting the stereotypes that often silence them. My works are deeply personal but extend into a larger conversation about visibility, and the right to self-representation.
Biography
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; Transversing 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, Princeton, and Lagos.
