Imo Nse Imeh, Artist Statement

Anatomy of Beauty

As a scholar of African art and aesthetics, my artwork has increasingly developed an ideological framework that is deeply rooted in Ibibio custom and philosophy.

My current project, The Scepter & the Flywhisk, is the visual embodiment of my dissertation. My project at Yale University is interdisciplinary, fusing art and writing to relay Ibibio and African-American ideologies. Subsequently, my rendered figures possess a documentary existence and introduce a fusion between the Ibibio voice and Western artistic styles.

With large-scale paintings, I re-imagine the world as comprising a conceptual fattening house, in which the isolated black body realizes trauma and devastation, but then emerges with insight, acuity and spiritual prowess. The figures that I paint and draw comprise body designs, textual expanse, nsibidi ideograms (ritualistic symbols from southern Nigeria), and an overwhelming repetition of bifurcated heads, torsos, and limbs that collectively describe the black body not solely in terms of traumatized flesh and blood, but also as an historical document. I appropriate traditional Ibibio conceptions of beauty to rewrite the history and experience of the African Diaspora. My rationale in embracing a Nigerian philosophical framework to talk about a universal “black experience” comes from the inherent ambivalence in Ibibio thought, especially with regards to uyai, or “beauty.”

Consequently, my work dramatizes Ibibio ambivalence and paradox: I show stoic faces and tranquil bodies paired with screaming and tortured forms that writhe in pain, black bodies that float gracefully juxtaposed with overtly angular and violent gestures, textual bodies that encompass an infinite number of corporeal phrases to rewrite the histories of black trauma, separation, and spirituality. These are the things that truly represent and speak volumes of the experience of the African Diaspora. What I offer to the sphere of American Art and beyond is a body of work that addresses the notion of physical, spiritual, and emotional ambivalence in black life while presenting the black body as a complex site of celebration and trauma, recall and ambiguity, contemplation and dismissal, resuscitation and death.