Review of “Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America”
“Olalekan Jeyifous’s fantastical collages uniquely capture the speculative spirit running throughout “Reconstructions.” His compositions, in both print and video, depict dense urban landscapes of concrete structures covered with greenery, topped with colorful billboards, and interspersed with weary but stable infrastructure. Picturing a kind of heterotopia in which Blackness is normalized, these visualizations seem both foreign and familiar, though perhaps no more so than the highly racialized conditions of the here and now. I visited “Reconstructions” with my seven-year-old son, a Black boy, who stood transfixed before Jeyifous’s otherworldly renderings, asking me, “Where is this? Is it real? Is it a video game? Can we go there?” Indeed, the strange and captivating spaces tread a thin and delicate line between reality and Otherness, though what stands out is the presence of Black bodies in the ethereal worlds that the artist and designer conjures. These lush cityscapes, which seem both highly technical and rough and worn, reflect, through a kind of inverted social lens, the grave contradictions we live with today—cities of immense wealth wracked with devastating poverty; a scientifically advanced society on the brink of environmental collapse. Jeyifous is not alone in illustrating these narratives, but he frames them via a new kind of “speculative fiction,” one in which Black bodies not only exist within an imaginative ecological urbanism but can also shape its developing narrative.”
- Art Forum, April 19, 2021