Catriona Jeffries

Locutions: Fragments out of a Deluge is an interchanging system of video, ceramic, and sound installations that look to quotidian rituals as a scheme for examining notions of identity, community, place, class, and diaspora.

Ukaigwe traverses the landscape of media as generative, simultaneous, and multiple; the installations in this exhibition are conceived as embodiments and documents of dynamic social scenarios, often produced in response to his own lived experience, as well as collective experiences of home, migration, isolation, and dislocation. Locutions is a collaborative effort. The artist worked closely with, and shares authorship with, cross-continental communities.

Spread across the gallery space are large ceramic vessels emitting rhizomatic sonic documentations of transient happenings in multiple timelines, situations, and bearings, paying attention to the urban life in the city of Lagos, Nigeria. The anthropomorphic, dichromatic, and sundry shaped vessels alter and refract the sound waves passing through them, hence simulating a cacophonous sonic topography.

Other ceramic work within the show gestures towards ceramics as a medium, and its economy across gender, ritual, labor/function, food, and phenomena: permutations of vessels and burlap are suspended with a pedestal of wooden and metal rods that connect them with other vessels at base.

In the video installation Time Off, groups of African men meet and participate in a shared ritual of gathering—developed around a concentrated, devotional, energetic and ultimately aesthetic activity. Two separate events overlap, as the sounds of an intimate jazz jam session (recorded in 2019) play over video footage of young men swimming (filmed in 2023), a reference to ritual rebirth through immersion or ablution. Community and identity are paradoxically grounded by and symbolically contained in a fluid, multifaceted, and relational process. Ukaigwe seems to understand the open-ended social scenarios he sets up—and by extension the “containing” artwork—as another form of gathering, an exploration of juxtaposition, interaction, and flow.

Untitled (Moulding Identities), a video installation made up of 80 frames, involves a similar interplay between the production of contained individuals and a sort of propositional community, invented by the work through interplay between framing and energetic action. All of the videos—half of which document daily rituals, and half of which document artistic processes—were solicited from acquaintances and artists across Canada.

Ukaigwe further extends the dynamic relational logic of the two works into the space they inhabit. Time Off’s placement on the floor suggests a fountain or pool, and Untitled acts as a frenetically kinetic wall of light, sound, and action, both transforming the architecture of the exhibition.

Locutions: Fragments out of a Deluge is a big sea of sociological sediments for contemplating notions of being.

Documentation by Mika Abbott.