S. Yemisi Adeyemo

Lives and works in New York, NY

Artist statement

S. Yemisi Adeyemo is an interdisciplinary artist working at the intersection of assemblage, painting, and sculpture. She draws from the visual languages of Afro-diasporic traditions, folk and ritual objects, shanty structures, makeshift and make-do tactics, Black feminist thought, and the history of painting to create devotional and disobedient objects. Adeyemo’s practice includes a distinct combination of imagery and materiality. Carefully selected primary source photographs from articles, social media, and digitized archives serve as reference material for the painted vignettes that dress the surfaces of her work. These choice moments survey both current and historical events: material conditions across global and domestic contexts, socio-political and counter-hegemonic movements, examples of resilience, and experiences of tremendous grief. The slow and deliberate re-presentation of these images is an attempt to resist algorithmic complacency and reshape the ephemeral into material. From there, tracing the interconnectedness of each moment becomes part of her work’s aspiration to build political consciousness. The sculptural components of Adeyemo’s work are fashioned out of discarded materials recovered from urban public space. She calls upon the visual and spiritual cues of such assemblage-based folk traditions as memory jugs, bottle trees, altars, and gravesite offerings. Her practice is, in many ways, influenced by her late father: the material remnants of his life,...

Artwork