Walk With Me — KAMBUI OLUJIMI

Walk With Me

Growing up every momentous or sensitivity conversation required a walk. There was no way you could absorb the impact of this news as a static being. That would be ridiculous. No matter the weather or time of day, you put your coat, put on your boots or raincoat or sunshades and we would walk. Proposals, divorces deaths, births all required us to outpace our fears. The title of the show comes from this tradition.

Walk With Me, is a collection of works on paper that look at notions of memory, grief, and forgetting. October 23, 2014, I lost my guardian angel Catherine Arline. Beyond her impact in my personal development, she was a community leader and pillar of the Bedford Stuyvesant community, and the city of New York. For more than the last five years, I have created paintings from a photograph of her when she moved to New York at 18-year-old. Flattened by grief the work became a place of both healing and sharing time with her.

For over five years, I have created more than 100 paintings. The word engages in the process of remembering, forgetting, and my·thol·o·gize. These portraits slide in and out of fidelity an accurate rendering, alternating between gestural watery movements and tight "faithful" for renderings. The collection offers no truths. Their origin remains elusive, blurring between the latent images we create images between each work, leaving us to build and rebuild each memory in between each retelling.

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Walk With Me, at Project for Empty Space

photo: Anthony Alvarez

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Walk With Me, Project for Empty Space

photo: Anthony Alvarez

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Walk With Me, at Project for Empty Space

photo: Anthony Alvarez

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Walk With Me, series 2015-2020

Ink on paper