221A Interview Series: Odera Igbokwe

It's a little bit cliche, but ever since I was a kid, I’ve been interested in all forms of art, whether it was dancing, singing, or making things. I think what was special about drawing and painting was that I didn't have to ask for permission. If I was really shy, I could practice in the corner and nobody had to observe it. I still really loved to dance. But that required taking up space in a different way. It wasn’t as simple as taking out a pencil.
So I feel like the seeds were always there, and it was just a matter of how I found myself wanting to navigate. Once I started exploring dance more seriously, I found that I had less immediate agency and bodily autonomy. When I’m drawing or  have a commission, someone gives me the proposal or a brief. And then I am in my studio without someone literally guiding my hand. Whereas with dance and choreography, it was very gendered and “1-2-3-4”. This is what you're doing with your body. Boys do this. Girls do this. So between queerness, and my need for immediate creative freedom, that’s what kept dance as a creative pool to tap into, rather than a profession.

The foundational pieces are my ancestry, Nigerian songs, West African dances, and indigenous African practices before colonization. My parents are also Roman Catholic and very religious, but when I was a kid, I would ask myself “why are we Roman Catholic, but stress the importance of Nigerian identity?” So there was always that questioning and tension there, and then years of church created a foundation for practicing or at least thinking about spirituality.
It all started to crystallize much later in a roundabout way; my gateway into drawing was video games. I wanted to draw fantasy characters, and perhaps be a character designer one day. This was the early 2000s, and I was playing lots of RPGs (roleplaying games) like Final Fantasy.
In these games you would have magic spells and deities as part of the lore. For example there was a spell that summoned an ice goddess named Shiva. And I would think, wait isn’t that an actual god, so what's going on here?
I was a teen at this point, so there were moments of cognitive dissonance and not having the language to name cultural appropriation. But I processed this tension by asking, “what would it look like if I made my own version of these characters and spells, but explored my own identity and ancestral practices?” That  questioning planted the seeds to explore and research not only mythologies, but actual ancestral and spiritual practices and realities.

I grew up in the ‘90s on the east coast in New Jersey. I was listening to a lot of R&B, hip-hop, and dance. The first album I bought was Aaliyah’s One In a Million, and that was also my gateway to listening to Missy Elliott.  I absolutely loved the music, the dance, the performance. But the cherry on top was seeing how Aaliyah, Missy, and the upcoming Y2K phenomena were exploring their own versions of Afrofuturism. Combined with everything else I mentioned (video games, Nigerian culture, etc), this really set me up for looking towards the future and the past in order to anchor myself now.

Today, the first person that comes to mind is Khari Johnson-Ricks. I love his beautiful kinetic imagery and figuration that centers Black dance lineages. I love keeping up with former classmates like Tura Oliveira and Jon Key and Jarrett Key. And just recently I saw Martine Gutierrez's show at the Polygon Gallery, which was phenomenal.

I also make it a point to continue looking at works from artists I have been in group shows with. I love artists like Fegor Obuwoma, Yaimel López Zaldívar, Oluseye Ogunlesi, Karice Mitchell, and Lauren Brevner and seeing what questions we are collectively asking.

 I'd say the basic pieces have stayed the same, in terms of the types of questions I'm asking and how I want to maintain my childlike curiosity. But a central part of my practice, for better or worse, has been to figure out how to constantly push the needle forward with my art.
My foundation was very much rooted in a kind of imaginative realism, a certain type of Eurocentric painting history, commercial illustration, and fantasy art. This created a tension with my subject matter, because often there was a flattening where African art could only be seen as sculpture, dance, and song.To be more specific, my foundation was illustration that used painting techniques that explored the African diaspora and Queer identity as the subject matter. But I found myself trying to fit this artwork into the confines of illustration. But in the past few years, I have made it a point to not focus on genre or stylistic checkpoints. Rather I am creating works that don’t follow the prompts of a client, and instead follow the prompts of spirit, of collective consciousness, of the big roaring questions. A recent shift has also been pulling from all of my creative pools. In the past I kept dance, song, fashion, etc as hobbies that were separate from my professional creativity. There is still value to that, but I am excited to let those worlds blend and alchemize a little bit more.

 I've had to unlearn being a workhorse. Life is more than work. And even if I wanted the “work” to be better, I have to allow for more moments of freedom, lived experience, and experimentation.
In the past year or two, I've really had to create intentional  pockets and space for improvisation. Often my workflow can be incredibly systemic, where I am building a roadmap for a finished painting. It has served me well but I find that it creates a very specific sort of refined imagery.
If I want to break free from that, or find more space for improvisation, I have to say, “Okay, you can't spend five hours with the tiniest brush, it’s time to stop.” This is the time to bring something else in.
I also liken it back to the dance experience, where, for instance, you can choreograph a piece. That's dozens and dozens of hours tinkering, cleaning, and perfecting in front of a mirror. But the most exciting breakthroughs are the improvisational moments where you just feel the music or listen to your body and see what new things appear.

I’ve always been extremely curious about the broad spectrum of ideas and possibilities. I went to Catholic school up until going to art school for undergraduate studies, and that was a really freeing shift.
By the time I was a teenager, I was thinking, “I don't know how much of this I believe in,” especially as a racialized Black Queer Nigerian-American. I would see white Jesus on the wall and it didn’t seem right to me that this was the centrality of my family’s worship. The way I got through the masses and schooling was to tell myself “even if I don't believe in this, what lessons can I learn from this? What is this teaching me about survival? About otherness?”. From there, I had a natural curiosity; I don't know what I believe, and it’s allowed to change, but what can I learn from this? What is this telling me? In recent years it’s been intriguing to study, observe, and learn about different Afro-diasporic spiritualities. Odinala, is the pre-colonial spiritual reality and practice of the Igbo people, so there are aspects of that I was born into and that are inextricable to my personhood. From there I have branched into learning about Orisha from the Yoruba people, Santería, Candomblé, and all the variant, adjacent, and spiritual practices that are in conversation with each other. Ultimately, I view these as systems that can provide answers or more questions. And simply existing and learning about these systems is a guiding force in my artwork, especially with the divination paintings I have been developing over the past few years.

There are obvious, immediate answers that come to me, like racism and queerphobia. There have been responses to my work that are filled with microaggressions, ignorance, and blatant bias. And in a place like Vancouver, it can be really obvious when someone has never interacted with Black art or even spoken to a Black person before.
There’s always that question of, how much is this response to the art (be it positive or negative) a judgment about the quality of the work versus interacting with Blackness.
I also feel like Vancouver has a culture of passivity. It takes a lot for people to show up. And it's such a huge cultural shift for me, as someone who was living in Brooklyn before this.In New York, there are Black and Brown and Queer communities that are obsessed with the hustle and the grind and everyone’s doing seven things at a time, but maybe one of those things is showing up and getting active.
Whereas here, people seem excited and interested in making things and making a difference, and in the final hour they just go silent. Often the rain and grey seems to zap people of their ability to show up. It's a very strange culture of passivity, or soft neutrality.
I also think Black culture and the culture of the African diaspora can really steer the heartbeat and soul of a city. And Vancouver has a specific history with Black people that might contribute to this cultural passivity. That’s just a hypothesis on my end. 

I've been working on a lot of grant projects. The two major ones are exciting and delving into previously established work. One of them is exploring spiritual syncretism, contemporary mythology, and Afrodiasporic archetypes. In short I am making my own version of a hybrid tarot-oracle-divination deck. It will be about 70 images, which I am slowly but surely chipping away at.The second project I'm working on focuses on mythophoric queer embodied paintings where I'm trying to be more experimental. I think with work that addresses the sacred, it's very easy to become too reverent or uptight or serious. So with a lot of these pieces, I’m tapping into joy, pleasure, and the everyday. I think the painting behind me,  Beyond the Lotion Bench, is a good example. I was inspired by the ritual of getting ready every day, and what it would look like if that routine was always filled with ease and respite. Ultimately this second body of work is asserting that the line between the everyday and the sacred is much thinner than we can anticipate.

Thank you.