Interdisciplinary fine artist Jameel Amman will be at the Farmer Family Gallery from 4-6 p.m., Thursday, January 23, 2025, to open his new show Movement & Memory, an exhibition dedicated to the work of Sankofa. The works on display are a series of figurative drawings and digital paintings, collages and immersive experiences, intended to conjure African ancestral memory. Sankofa is a term that communicates the cyclical nature of time, relating one’s existence to the past, present and future. In keeping with this tradition, these works conjure the past into the present and future, and vice versa.
The opening and exhibition are free and open to the public. Movement & Memory will be in the Farmer Family Gallery from January 23-March 6. The gallery is located in Reed Hall. Regular gallery hours are 11 a.m.-4 p.m., Monday-Thursday, with further visitation by appointment. Contact breidenbach.44@osu.edu.
This series was inspired by years of studying Africana scholarship, indigenous African spirituality, and Afrofuturism. The exhibition features a series of vibrantly colored, layered drawings and prints depicting African people and ritual masks that are evocative of African spirituality, alongside a series of achromatic portraits that focus on the lived reality of African people. In the centerpiece of the exhibition, Congo Square VR, viewers are transported to the spirit realm, traversing a circular procession around symbolic representations of the Creator and the ancestors who guard and protect the descendants of the African diaspora.
Amman’s work integrates traditional media (painting and drawing) with emerging media (virtual and mixed reality). As a 2D artist, Amman specializes in portraiture and the figure, using oil paint, acrylic, and charcoal to depict everyday black figures and black life. As a digital artist, he uses hip-hop and Afrofuturism to inform his digital works, applying sampling, syncopation, jazz theory and low-end theory to VR development and digital collage.