RUBY ONYINYECHI AMANZE

Over the past decade amanze has been building an intentional cast of characters and structural elements that populate her drawing practice. Space, architecture, and movement are also large thematic building blocks in her practice. Recent exhibitions have seen the artist translate what plays out on the paper surface into the exhibition space. amanze’s 2022 London exhibition ‘DUETS’ was the first crystallisation of this approach, with the works offering a dimensionality and understanding of space that positions the artist as a choreographer. The Johannesburg show pushes this exploration, further extending the viewing experience.

amanze imagines the space in her drawings as rooms which can be physically entered. Figures and objects occupy these rooms in compositions that skew and call into question an assumed perspective. Although minor in their individual capacity, the effect of these smaller shifts produce a cumulative disorientation/ reorientation. The disruption in the plane of the drawing spills out into how the artworks interact within the exhibition space.

The characters within the artist’s work have devolved over time, moving from personas with stories and personal connection to amanze, to objects or puzzle pieces. This softening, almost flattening of these figures enables them to morph in their form, to manifest in differing materials - graphite, ink, photo transfers - or even disappear entirely. The bodies they inhabit are also able to exist as form, as opposed to an attachment to the body as identity. The show also includes new iterations of a relatively new element; the swimming pool.

amanze’s work is made in conjunction with thinking about and knowing the space in which they will be experienced. This can be seen in the site-specific work ‘Infinite Deep Blue, contained [POOL]’ which is made according to the gallery wall dimensions.

Viewers are encouraged to engage in deep seeing, modelled after the sonic practice of deep listening; a phrase coined by late experimental composer and teacher, Pauline Oliveros. The objective is not just to look [a biological ability and action, that at times, is passive], but to see [to consciously notice and become aware through your eyes].

ruby onyinyechi amanze (b. 1982, Port-Harcourt, Nigeria) is a Brooklyn-based artist of Nigerian descent and British upbringing whose creative practices and processes focus on producing mixed media, paper-based drawings and works. Her art draws inspiration from photography, textiles, architecture and print-making.

amanze’s practice builds around questions of how to create drawings that maintain paper’s essence of weightlessness. The large-scaled and multi-dimensional drawings are part of an ongoing, yet non-linear narrative that employ the malleability of space as the primary antagonist.

A nameless, self-imagined, chimeric universe has simultaneously been positioned between nowhere and everywhere. Using a limited palette of visual elements, including ada the Alien, windows and birds, amanze’s drawings create a non-narrative and expansive world. The construction of this world is largely centered around an interest in the spatial negotiations found in the three dimensional practices of dance, architecture and design.

Most recently, amanze completed two-year long residencies at the Queens Museum and as part of the Drawing Center’s Open Sessions Program, both in New York. She has exhibited her work internationally in Lagos, London, Johannesburg and Paris, and nationally at the California African American Museum, the Drawing Center and the Studio Museum of Harlem.

amanze earned her B.F.A., Summa Cum Laude, from Tyler School of Art, Temple University, and her M.F.A. from Cranbrook Academy of Art. In 2012-2013, amanze was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka.

amanze lives and works between Philadelphia and Brooklyn, but calls multiple places home