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.