'Ifetemi Richards', oilpainting painting artist AND photographer Lagos, Nigeria”, 2021
Biograph
IFÉ MÉMÉNTOS is a art gallery ownedby best-friends Ifeoluwa Argbola and Ifetemi Richard. They are digital artists and deal with both oilpainting and photography. their work addresses issues facing everyday life and their experiences as women in the world technology’s failure to capture the unstable human body.
they both grew up Lagos,nigeria but had their higher education in Melbourne, Australia. they both live and work and shuffle between Nigeria and Brooklyn, New York. Having earned a BA (Hons) in Fine Art/History of Art at Lagos State University, Nigeria They both travel aboard to get their master degree at the, University of London and an MFA in Art and Technology Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
IFÉ MÉMÉNTOS was recently an artist in residence with the Studio Program at the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts in New York (paused due to COVID).Their works has been exhibited artwork in Nigeria, New York, Los Angeles, London, Paris, Sydney, Tokyo, Osaka and Seoul. They have also taught in the Department of Digital Arts at Pratt Institute as a Visiting Associate Professor, and at University of Lagos, Nigeria, as a visiting instructor.
Artist Talk
The psychological underpinnings of IFÉ MÉMÉNTOS work are based upon the artist’s personal history of as witnesses to the chronic illness affecting their world and culture. Looking through the lens of an artist with history, they examines significant moments where older technologies like photography similarly failed to capture the female-identified body and its attendant madnesses.
These works suggest an unstable, monumental, body-as-architecture, under continuous construction -- or perhaps demolition.
they looks at their early training as a photographer to amplify the eeriness of creating digital duplications of the human body within the space of the virtual.
Their most recent series, Summer of Mystery , was created with Niyi Olu as a muse. These images speak to the inherent deathliness of 3D replications of the digital body, and suggest the separation of body and digital avatar as an almost religious operation.
In all their works, the human body is de-materialized, separated from the physical, and then re-materialized into a vastly altered form. Subsequently, the artist challenges standard viewpoints by creating her own subjective, embodied and very human way of seeing through a technological lens.
