Emmanuel Osahor: Things Once Seen

“How do we pay attention to things that are smaller than us or so distant from us that they seem small?,” Emmanuel Osahor asks through his new body of work. Painted from a collection of photographs taken over the past two years, the paintings in Things Once Seen depict environments the artist encounters on a daily basis in his neighbourhood in the north of Toronto. 

 

Osahor contemplates how the sphere of your everyday life can provide a space for reflection and daydreaming. For Osahor, this space is realised in his garden and those of friends and neighbors. Osahor calls us to observe every corner:  resident birds, the swirling pattern on fences, and plants being watered. In these most recent works, Osahor uses distemper, a combination of  pigments mixed with rabbit skin glue, on linen. This imbues the surfaces of the paintings with an ethereal quality that seems to invite meditation. 

A central motif in this new body of work is birds. Seven Days a Week is a seven-piece series of small paintings of a singular bird. The bird itself is lifted from Frans Synder and Cornelis de Vos’ Evisceration of a Roebuck with a Portrait of a Married Couple at the Art Gallery of Ontario. Initially Osahor painted the bird as a study for a section in the foreground of another painting in the exhibition, The Brevity of Spring, but found himself drawn to the act of repetition as a way of paying attention to such a vulnerable moment. Through repetition, Osahor explores how returning to the same image over and over brings  a level of significance back to the smallness of this creature.

“This collection of paintings reflects on the times we're in  - touching on changes in my own family life, as well as coming to terms with the degree of uncertainty that seems ubiquitous to contemporary existence these days and asks: In what ways can the quotidian create room for reflection and speculation?” - Emmanuel Osahor