Abbey IT-A

Some Things Stay Broken…and their failed parts are further broken down into vehicular solutions (no pun intended) and shimmering encounters?

Flashback, 2021. Jonathan Okoronkwo’s MFA thesis exhibition Condem Condem Kɔ Ntεm (2021), invites a ‘secondary audience’ to experience works scattered throughout the active mechanic and scrap yard of Aboabo Nima Moke in Kumasi. Its site-specificity transforms this audience into scavengers in charge of finding their own experiences of art and into participants within the very systems that inform Okoronkwo’s work. Au contraire, Some Things Stay Broken (2022) proposes a non-site experience for its audience. Staged in Gallery 1957, one seems able to access the entire show from a single standpoint.

The question of accessibility bears asking. Is there more accessibility in the case for Condem Condem Kɔ Ntεm, with works hiding in the open scrap yard whilst implicating the new scavengers in invading the work and living space of the people in Nima Moke—the ‘primary audience’; or is there more accessibility in that for Some Things Stay Broken, with works showing behind the rather intimidating walls of Kempinski Hotel in Ridge—a historically exclusive suburb of Accra?

Against this paradoxical backdrop, what else is hidden in Okoronkwo’s objects that depict overtly broken things, for the audience’s rummaging pleasures or perhaps discomfort?

In considering the exhibition space as an organism, Some Things Stay Broken establishes two central installations—dendroids made of heavy hydraulic pipes and hoses—as anchors for this reflection. Two trees in the middle are evocative of the biblical garden of Eden, reaffirming the gallery space as sacrosanct…urm, not exactly. Living trees are messy; they bloom flowers and invite insects, they grow fruit and invite rot, their leaves fall and litter and they breed all manner of microorganisms, and this is only a few of their many atrocities. Trees are generative and unfinished. These particular ones leave accidental greasy stains on the floor and one is tempted to wish for more sacrilege–maybe a bit on the walls here and there? The ceiling? No? Bummer.

If we consider the hidden concrete structures that hold the heavy pipe trees up, we may also begin to wonder what other structures hold what things together? The selected works mounted on the walls and fencing in the trees, trace a gentle graduation of Okoronkwo’s experimentations in painting broken engine parts. From wooden surfaces stained with dull engine oils to metallic ones that shimmer glamorously in the light, it is only upon close inspection of these metallic works that their wooden edges reveal themselves and break the illusion. What else may come out of the woodwork, literally? To describe these works as paintings would be somewhat insufficient given that the artist employs a host of mediums including photography, sculpture, welding, carpentry, et cetera to arrive at the objects in the space.

Okoronkwo achieves these shimmering surfaces by first dissolving cast iron engine parts in nitric acid and then mixing the solution with dilute sulfuric acid. Because “Iron and steel react vigorously to acid-water solutions of 7:3 ratios respectively” Nitrogen oxide and Hydrogen gases are released in brown fumes. The alluring, beautifully glossy finish speaks nothing of the highly toxic and reactive gases which compel the artist to wear protective gear and to work in open air spaces–unlike the pristine halls of this gallery space.

By way of collage, the artist introduces sourced metal parts onto their pictorial counterparts, following the latter’s three-dimensional aspirations. In doing so, we are presented the opportunity to either celebrate the artist’s achievement of naturalistic renderings or be confronted with the failings of such unrealistic aspirations (or both). This incites a subtle but spirited scavenger-hunt for these tiny treasures in the clever spots they occupy. The artist also consciously leaves parts of the painted surfaces unfinished, which he describes as “spaces [which] were initially intended to offer a rest stop for the eyes and mind from wandering among the saturated details of the work. But they also speak to pockets of vacant spaces in the chaos of the scrapyard which hold potential to be occupied by other objects.”

This exhibition manages a fictional dystopian world rife with inevitable failures but which is at once filled with immeasurable potentialities, continues an ongoing homage to the scrapyard and the artist’s dedication to experimentation.

Some Things Stay Broken (2022) is a solo exhibition of works by Jonathan Okoronkwo, curated by Tracy Naa Koshie Thompson at Gallery 1957.

— Abbey IT-A
Supplemented with thoughts from King David Osabutey and fact-checking with the artist.