four people are sitting and standing at various distances from one another. Their bodies are roughly outlined human forms with little to no detail of attributes of gender or distinct personalities. They almost float on the fabric like human casings of what once was. Clothes fuse into skin, which fuses into setting, which fuses into landscape. There is a blur of boundaries between interior and exterior space.
Through this piece, it is as though Omuku was contemplating what it felt like to be suddenly isolated physically from one’s community while also still holding them present in this collective experience, how trauma and grief can hold people both together and apart simultaneously, physically and emotionally.
For Omuku, this overlap of physical spaces in her work is a cue to viewers of her own ongoing attempts to think about what’s happening in both our created and our natural environments. “I’m still processing what I see and experience in the world as of late,” she says. “How so much that happens to us as people and communities and in the world as a whole appears illogical.”
Given the safety guidelines, our bodies are still renegotiating how to be with other bodies in spaces once so free and unthreatening, and we’ve had to contend with thinking consciously and conscientiously about decisions of gathering for the sake not of our individual pleasures but rather for the sake of the greater communal good. These are global concerns affecting everyone..
We’re having to reckon with how our belief systems, assumptions, and actions also take up space in ways that possibly crowd out not only the needs of others, but sometimes even the humanity of others. Many of the paintings in Omuku’s exhibition offer glimpses into emotionally fraught and layered stories of vulnerability, pain, grief, courage, and despairing frustration over life’s seemingly illogical injustices.
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