Nigeria Content Online

In December of
2010, I left Lagos for a week to go back to my village, the scenes of
my childhood and my ‘primary colours’, with the sole purpose of
discovering what has influenced my art over the years. Some things I
could pull from memory, but there were many I had forgotten or never
really experienced. With a keen eye and a camera, I set to work; and
what I discovered about my heritage and ancestral home was shocking to
me. Until then, I did not realise that, over the decades of my art
practice, I have unconsciously been feeding off of what was always
there as part of my everyday life when I was growing up, which I never
paid much attention to. The numerous shrine walls in neighbouring
villages, the painted mud walls of my grandmothers’ homes, my uncles’
decorated rooms and other villagers’ walls were all beaming with
different kinds of art. I photographed as many as possible, because it
was obvious that many people no longer care about these ‘primitive and
pagan’ arts.

With some of the
walls and art already gone, and a very few left, I set to work on what
remained. Some of the bold use of earth tone colours on walls reminded
me of Mark Rothko’s large canvasses. The valour with which colours,
patterns and designs were engraved or drawn on walls, doors and other
surfaces fueled my drawings with chalks on the bare, dilapidated walls.
Because I considered the chalk on wall drawings temporary, I decided to
photograph them for posterity; and perhaps in so doing, I could show
the world things that may not ordinarily be seen in their natural
state.

I thought I would
stop at the drawings on walls and doorways. However, I found myself
thinking about the history behind the walls and the doors I drew on in
the village, and so I decided to extend the experience to my studio in
Lagos. People that have come and gone in my life over time through the
passageways kept playing in my memory. My grandmothers, my father and
many of my uncles who have left, came alive again. The doors I
rejuvenated through art, were the same ones they traversed while alive.
I began to look at the duality of the doorway, a passageway for entry
and exit, life and death, night and day. Life itself is full of doors,
whether real or imagined. I am yet to see any human that hasn’t gone
through a door. Whatever we do when we enter or exit from any door in
life is what shapes our lives as humans on earth.

It is also
pertinent to say that the works in ‘Entrances and Exits’ go beyond
physical doors; they signify transitions in life. In between the
comings and goings, memories are built constantly. Memories of how we
move from one phase of life to another, from childhood to adulthood,
boy to man, girl to woman, life to death, etc. The events that
orchestrate these transitions are mystical, not physical, and sometimes
invisible, yet they manifest as some kind of door.

All materials used
in producing these paintings and drawings are physically cut in the
shape of doors, in order to reveal another side of the same work. This
is symbolic of the openings and closings that are associated with
doors. Birth and death have doorways, be it a woman’s birth canal or
the gaping grave on the earth.

Victor
Ehikhamenor’s ‘Entrances & Exits: In Search of Not Forgetting’
opens at the Centre for Contemporary Art (CCA), 9 McEwen Street, Sabo,
Yaba, Lagos on Saturday, May 7, and will be on display until May 28.