…shows in ‘City Dwellers’ @ Alexis Galleries

By Osa Mbonu-Amadi, Arts Editor

A solo art exhibition titled “City Dwellers” showing recent mixed-media works by Uchay Joel Chima will open May 3, 2025 at Alexis Galleries, and run till May 17.

Patty Chidiac Mastrogiannis

founder of Alexis Gallery, in a statement at a press briefing announcing the exhibition, said

Chima’s works “involve upcycling everyday consumer materials, including rice sacs, aluminum canned drinks, burnt wood and experimenting with found objects such as thread and wax, sand, copper wire and charcoal.”

Uchay Joel Chima, the exhibiting artist, also spoke with Vanguard in preparation for the upcoming “City Dwellers”. He said: “I am an experimental artist. I experiment with charcoal, rice sac (because we’re what we eat), strings, thread, roots, etc. They are symbolic.” The artist said the theme determines the material he uses for any particular work.

“In ‘City Dwellers’,” Chima said, “I will be telling stories with things that are happening. A friend of mine came from California and was telling me how the Hollywood Hill was burnt down. I said, I have to represent these things with my works.

“For years I’ve talking about the need for us to take care of our environment. When people talk about global warming and climate change, these things are real.”

On why he is preoccupied with with California fire when we have our own domestic environmental problems in Nigeria like erosion, environmental degradation as a result of oil production, etc., Chima said he is a global artist. “I’ve done shows in many countries like America. I’ve lived in those places. I’ve done residency programs in those places. I have a global view of things, and climate change is not a regional problem, it’s a global environmental problem.”

The artist gave some of the titles of the works that will be on display at the City Dwellers exhibition: “The city was burnt down”, “Neighbourhood gist”, “Spirit of dance”, “Invitation to dance”, etc.

On the incursions of digital art and AI-generated paintings into art practice, Chima said all of them have their places. “There are people that, no matter what you do, they want to collect digital art. There are also those who are in love with real paintings of oil on canvas. Every generation carries its own burden.”

According to Alexis Galleries, “Uchay’s mixed-media works explore the dynamic preoccupation of city people and their built-in hybrid environment, inviting viewers to engage in the daily realities and routine of contemporary urban culture.”

The curator of the exhibition, Uche Obasi, said “City Dwellers is an intimate reflection of urban life through the inventive mix-media techniques of Uchay Joel Chima.”

The artist, he said, through a process of deconstruction and reconstruction, “transforms these materials by burning, restoring, and reinventing them into the manifold and duality of meanings, to engage with the idea and agency of transformation, regeneration, and community.”

The exhibition, the curator also said, “draws viewers to connect with the global realities of urbanization, the weighty emotions, and the urgency of social and economic impositions and dispositions of city dwellers within their lived experiences and built hybrid environments.

“One of his paintings titled ‘Committee of Friends’, rendered with thousands of interlocked threads and knitted ropes glued on a surface, shows an impression of lush-like vegetated background and foreground, dripped in olive color and a contrast of intense orange color of abstracted silhouetted figures in an unending conversation. ‘Committee of Friends ‘ explore social cohesion and belonging within an ever-busy urban settlement.

“Two large-scale works on display that draws attention, titled “City Dwellers I” and “City Gate II.” “City Gate,” is composed of clustered grids of burnt charcoal glued and joined across seven unified panels, reflecting the unfortunate devastation caused by a raging inferno that burnt down popular California cities, including Hollywood Hills, Palisades, Eaton, and Hurst, reducing them to a crucible of ashes. “City Gate” reflects on the complexities and fragility of human conditions across urban cities and communities worldwide.

“City Dwellers I,” painted with faint, milkish acrylic color on a heavily draped rice sac surface, leaves a contour of protruding forms and embedded threads, with dragged lines of ropes that shows four figures – three women closely and affectionately leaning toward one man – addresses the realities of city women in an unceasing exploration and pursuit of an easier life and recourse.

“City Dwellers” urges us to ponder the coercive forces of socio-economic realities and complexities of urbanized city culture while reflecting on Chima’s layered use of intimate and domesticated materials. Working at the intersection of discarded material recomposition and community reorientation, Chima’s work gives agency to transformation and regeneration on the human condition within our increasingly material spaces.

Uchay Joel Chima is an internationally acclaimed interdisciplinary Nigerian artist and founder of Museum of Contemporary Art, Lagos, (MoCA), established in 2018. He studied Painting from the Art School of the Institute of Management and Technology in Enugu, Nigeria, graduating in 1997.

He has exhibited works in prominent galleries and Museums around the world including Nigeria, South Africa, Canada, Sweden, Germany, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and the United States.