PRECIOUS OKOYOMON

The presentation brings together distinct bodies of work – sculptures, dioramas, drawings/ wallpaper, and a landscape installation – that explore ecosystems beyond the human and how belonging and care can be imagined within them in new and unexpected ways. Okoyomon’s celebrated practice is deeply interdisciplinary – the poetic impulse underlies much of their visual work and provides a framework for how each element communicates with the others. Through this highly immersive poeticized visual environment, the exhibition constructs a peronal mythology where the exposed body, naked voice – childlike, soft, with “fangs out” – paradoxically become the source of strength, with Okoyomon commanding their readers to love “thy only weapon” against extinction.

A central group of works introduces a kind of “Treasure Island” of ****bear creations that occupy the gallery with both playful charm and phantasmagoric, bedlamite strangeness. These child-sized figures, artisanally crafted in Switzerland, have shimmering eyes, glossy lips, cotton lace underwear, and rounded paws that animate their theatrical presence. They are playful and humorous, but also unsettling, mixing innocence with subtle hints of the erotic and the perverse. Their bodies touch the ground while their arses tilt toward the sky, fully open yet kept behind nets or contained within glass dioramas. This combination of exposure and protection shows how private inner worlds are at once vulnerable and carefully shielded from intrusion. Like beloved toys, they embody the transitional space between fantasy and external reality, suggesting how heterogeneous subjectivities are always co-constructed through relation and tension.

Okoyomon extends this idea in drawings of round, trembling particles with the watchful eyes of Microsphereology it’s Atmosphere Ethics – soulful bubbles that carry impressions of the self as porous, plural, and in perpetual transformation and varied states of becoming and in search of recognition. The bears and particles sit alongside three-dimensional scenes built to stage Okoyomon’s dreamlike environments and placed on the gallery’s wall or mounted on a plinth. Together, they stage theatrical scenes in vivid colors: pink skies, red flames, and dancing figures charged with both destruction and joy. Works such as ****Sun dried slick the flames blind us – to the fact the fire bears the real – the radical body as somehow untouchable and Our love is a blue instant and forward-looking sky ****explore similar tensions between violence, fragility, and play, pressing opposing energies into a single, hauntingly coherent and messy dreamscape.

The exhibition is accompanied by three new mid-length poems by Okoyomon that act as a fable and establish the emotional and conceptual tone for the entire project. Each poem, moves through cycles of destruction and renewal, beginning with memories of childhood fear and divine rescue, then shifting to apocalyptic visions of burning flowers, collapsing skies, and the extinction of the “Endling,” before arriving at declarations of survival where love is the only remaining weapon. The poems continually shift in voice and register, sliding from confession into commands creating a rhythm of urgency and intensity that accumulates, cohering to a central metaphor of the vulnerable body and poetic voice – exposed – become the vital ground of resilience. Read alongside the installations, the poems form a powerful argument for the case of fragility and endurance, suggesting that what remains, at the end of the world, are compassion, heterogeneous subjectivities, and the politics and poetics of care, with softness transformed into “hard gem like flame” (as the artist-poet writes).

Precious Okoyomon explores the ongoing impact of the historical construction of race on the natural world. They stage sculptural topographies – often monumental in scale – that seek to undermine what they call the “extraordinarily elaborate sociogenic denial of three raw material features of reality: Rot, decay, and rebirth.” They imagine their work as “an experiment in unthinking this mass invisibility of decomposition.” In their practice, organic materials serve a dual purpose: They remind us of our violent histories while celebrating nature’s ability to adapt and flourish in the face of man-made crises. If Okoyomon’s work continually asks us to listen to the natural world, it also contains warnings of what might happen should we fail to act.

The exhibition, curated by Claude Adjil, will also be accompanied by works by the artist at Mendes Wood DM’s booth at the fair.

Courtesy Mendes Wood DM