From origins spanning the globe, two artists converge in Dorsey’s Fine Art Gallery in Brooklyn, New York to express ancestral tribute via diverse cultural artistic fusions. The current exhibition, “Ancestral Harmonies: Tomo Mori and Jide Ojo”, includes thirty-two spiritually driven works of art that draw inspiration from the ancestral reverence common in both Japanese and Nigerian cultures. Mori, born in Japan, and Ojo, born in Nigeria, both now live and work in New York City. Both emphasize the collage and assemblage of various ephemera and materials that were gathered from around the world, the urban landscape, and the local community to serve as profound color, form, and texture manifestations. These artists do not rely on imitative or representational forms to convey overdetermined meaning, but let their work reverberate as transcendent symbolic funnels, channeling time and culture through a figurative hourglass, from the past into the present day and future.
Two large vertical elliptical artworks by Ojo, titled “Tears of My Ancestors #1” and “Tears of My Ancestors #2″, whose mixed media surfaces are simultaneously organic and structured, stand upright in the windows facing the street. Both have raised teardrop-like forms spread in an ordered way across each surface. The raised tear-like forms in ‘Tears of My Ancestors #1” are arranged on a curved, almost spherical grid of black lines, while more freely painted teardrops and swoops of jewel-toned colors of rich blues, greens, and purples contrast with non-metallic golds and pale yellows to reveal some features of a face, such as eyes and lips, behind the grid. “Tears of My Ancestors #2” uses straight rope-textured diagonal grid lines that interlink with a central column of angular forms that has the visual effect of a spinal column. Behind this ropey diagonal grid are crackly textured paint indications of an eye shedding tears and a face and torso poised in what appears to be anguish. Ojo continues his investigation of structure, texture, and color in the front gallery with artwork made using glass, plastic, resin, glitter, and other material. The luminosity and reflectivity of the materials, both transparent and translucent, act as forums for color gradients and rich textures that typically rely on a variety of grid structures for arrangement. With the exception of one upside-down tear shaped piece, these works are lozenge-shaped or square. The high tactile complexity and elaborate layering of colors and differing materials come together in a gestalt of visual clarity and meditative unity, similar to the practice of Tibetan monks building visually unified mandalas out of millions of grains of sand. Ojo’s meticulous use of formal grid structures enables a freedom of intuition as he assembles diverse media, colors, and varying interactions of levels of transparency and reflectivity. The overall effect is one of complexity meets simplified harmony, perhaps a simultaneous or paradoxical duality that reflects Ojo’s meditations on the complexity of generations of history, culture, and ancestral and personal journeys. The facial marks of his ancestors, that serve as tribal signifiers, inspire Ojo’s work, and he indicates that his work is “an introduction to what already exists.”
The middle gallery is filled with Tomo Mori’s compositions made with found fabrics combined with acrylic paint on canvas. She finds the multicolored and patterned fabrics around the world, bringing them together in collages made up of fabric squares, petal shapes, and also forms derived from the fabric’s patterns themselves. Mori’s process often involves painting the structure of her compositions, which include larger sweeping arcs and circles, before applying fabric, which she then does with significant attention to color gradients and harmonies. Her fabric squares evoke digital pixels, coming together in a beautiful singular orchestration made by bringing diverse entities with global origins together. As in Ojo’s work, a meditative clarity that renders a high level of visual complexity unified in a harmonious manner emerges in Mori’s large and sweeping forms and gradients. A sense of movement and space, exemplified in pieces such as “A Cradle and a Thousand Lullabies” or “Return to the Garden #4”, comes from Mori’s expert arrangement of all elements. In pieces such as “Rondo #3” or “Kimono Soul the Dream”, a feeling of floating, due to dark-valued backgrounds beneath lighter foreground elements, underscores that these artworks are much more than painted collages on canvas, but rather a portal to Mori’s mindscape and history as well as those of her ancestors and communities.
Both artists possess sophisticated understanding of the potential of form, value, texture, structure, color, and the possibilities of smaller parts equaling a different and larger whole, or gestalt. Eschewing representational image-making, Ojo and Mori access openly interpretable meaning that adeptly accesses complicated subject and content matter including time, spirituality, generations of ancestors, poetic thinking, meditations on families and communities, emotions, and more. Strictly representational art’s obvious verbally identifiable content would struggle to include so much meaning with as simplified visual clarity as demonstrated in Ojo and Mori’s art. It is worth noting that both artists’ backgrounds include training and work as graphic designers, where they likely gained a deep understanding of form’s potential. Perhaps they both also learned that to convey the deepest and most profound meditations, the energy of basic color, form, composition, texture, and pattern are all that are required. It is a joy to observe artwork by two artists as sensitive and thoughtful as Ojo and Mori.
The opening of “Ancestral Harmonies: Tomo Mori and Jide Ojo” also marks the inaugural exhibition of the “Lawrence P. Dorsey Permanent Collection” in the back gallery. This will be a recurring exhibition of the late eponymous gallery founder’s permanent collection, with works curated by his granddaughter Naima Wood that relate to the current front room exhibitions. This means that currently color and form are emphasized in the nonrepresentational works that fill the space. Harmonious but diverse works, from Beauford Delaney’s glowing 1967 painting of swirling forms of reds, umbers, and ambers; to Hale Woodruff’s 1977 “A Celestial Gate” print of translucent color layers of mark-making reminiscent of early pictographic cuneiform, relate well to the front exhibition not only in their approaches to form and color, but in a spirit of being evocative and meditative, rather than didactic or overdetermined. This gallery space, in poignant homage to Lawrence P. Dorsey, allows his eyes and intelligence to live on as the works he collected interact with current exhibits. We can see his thinking, tastes, and opinions, alive and present.
Dorsey’s Fine Art Gallery is nestled a few blocks away from the 17,000 square foot roller skating rink in Prospect Park. This venerable gallery has long-established roots in the community since its launch in 1970 by the late Lawrence P. Dorsey, and is known for championing diverse artistic voices and supporting underrepresented and Black artists during decades when many artistic institutions slammed doors to opportunity rather than opened them. It is the oldest, consistently run Black-owned art gallery in New York City.
Lawrence P. Dorsey’s granddaughter Naima Wood now runs the gallery, curating the three most recent remarkable exhibitions, “Otto Neals: Watercolors”, “Ann Tanksley: Conversations II”, and the current “Ancestral Harmonies: Tomo Mori and Jide Ojo”. Otto Neals is 93 and Ann Tanksley is 90. Both are masters at the top of their games as currently practicing artists with many decades of experience. It’s exciting to see Wood’s reinvigoration of her grandfather’s gallery with energetic, masterful artists and brilliant, thoughtful curation. Just as the current exhibition does, the gallery itself channels time and culture through a figurative hourglass, honoring ancestry and legacy from the past into the present day and future.
The exhibition runs through June 30, 2024.
Artist Talk: conversation with artists Tomo Mori and Jide Oji, moderated by Sophia Ma
Sunday, June 23, 2024 at 3:00 pm at Dorsey’s Fine Art Gallery
Dorsey’s Fine Art Gallery
553 Rogers Ave.
Brooklyn, NY 11225
718-210-9812
www.dorseysfineartgallery.com
All images are courtesy Dorsey’s Fine Art Gallery.
