By John Owoo
(In Accra – Ghana)
An exhibition of paintings by Kelvin Haizel that appropriate aesthetics largely inspired from paint shops in Accra and beyond, is currently on show at Gallery 1957 in Accra.
Titled “We Do Not Sleep to Dream”, Haizel effectively engages with theoretical aesthetics that emerge from diverse conductive processes, while borrowing from paint shop environments, wherein different surfaces exist as swatch board for paint samples.
Consequently – the paintings propose an operational vista where touch, vision and interpretation among others converge – thereby inviting audiences to engage with the multiple layers of meaning beyond the customary confines of abstractions.
Curated by Ato Annan, the artist employs complex forms / shapes as he applies a plethora of colours to the canvasses, which tend to be somewhat agitative and acquisitive while being permeated with a life-force of empirical analysis.
Haizel obscures surfaces by incorporating encoded textual interventions in Braille onto the surfaces of some works thereby creating a collocation of tactile and visual markers as he invites touch-accessible language and random fictionalized textures.
Without doubt, the title advances numerous propositions and questions. Indeed, he interrogates dream in its diverse forms including dreams while one is fully awake and asleep. He propounds that dreams occur in an active state with dreamers fully aware of their environs.
Currently a doctoral candidate at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (Kumasi), Haizel is actively committed to understanding the image via received notions of the expanded field of the photographical alongside experiments in image that extend beyond the visual to include sonic and haptic forms.
His installation titled “Things and Nothings” was showed at the 11th edition of Rencontres de Bamako (Mali) and participated in “Orderly Disorderly” exhibition (2017), organized by blaxTARLINES KUMASI at the Museum of Science and Technology in Accra. In the same year, he served as guest curator to the inaugural Lagos Biennale.
A winner of a prize for young contemporary photography “A New Gaze 2” presented by Vontobel Art Commission (Switzerland, 2018), he had his multi-sensorial solo exhibition in Zurich with an extension shown in the Stellenbosch Triennial (South Africa) in 2020 and a select few also exhibited at the Museum Belvédère as part of the 27th Nooderlicht Photo Festival “Generation Z” in 2020.
His work was equally shown in the exhibition “This Is Not Africa: Unlearn What You Have Learned” which opened at the ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum (Denmark) in 2021 and was in residency at the MARKK Museum (Germany), where he developed work from their photographic archive towards the Hamburg Photography Triennial in 2022.
The exhibition ends on Thursday March 28, 2024.
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