Kambui Olujimi’s current exhibit at the San Jose Museum of Art is fueled by one of the artist’s recurring dreams. He runs faster and faster until, “I approach the speed of light, my body starts to dematerialize and tear apart into this beam of light.”
In each of the large-scale watercolor and ink paintings on view in his North Star exhibit, bodies, not just Olujimi’s, float in a human-friendly, breathable outer space. It mustn’t be cold in this imaginary place because nobody’s clothed.
The entire gallery is covered in a comforting cobalt blue mural. Spectral motifs lift up and out of the paintings and onto the walls above their frames. Wandering through the gallery is a submersive experience. The outer space painted from Olujimi’s dream life resembles an ocean, or oceanic states of mind, as much as it does a map of his internal cosmos.
When he first dreamed about running and speeding into space, Olujimi writes that it was terrifying. “I’d feel myself getting hot, tearing apart one atom at a time. But these days when I have it, I just love it.”
Central to the series is a cadre of acrobatic bodies whose motions are slowed down to the pace of meandering sleepwalkers. Without gravity, their limbs and torsos overlap and somersault but in a relaxed, slow-motion drift rather than as a group of determined athletes racing to get to a finish line.
While the dark backgrounds within each painting remain in the same tonal register, Olujimi also subtly incorporates pale violets, yellows and oranges. Collectively the color scheme forms a coherent whole. One that the artist describes as “the black that birthed us.” The canvases are also populated with stars and tendrils and scintillating clouds of cosmic dust.
As the bodies circle and turn upside down and back again, their outlines trace out new constellations. In dreams, Olujimi and his cohorts companionably expand into the territory taken up for centuries by ancient Grecian myths. Their gymnastic poses also appear to be inspired by what the artist gleaned from his video installation North of Never. He arranged a parabolic flight for a group of Black artists and filmed them as they experienced weightlessness.
A note from the exhibit explains that the feeling of weightlessness Olujimi records and paints “is the innate state of freedom from the everyday violence of anti-Black racism and entrenched representational politics.” All those naked bodies are tumbling about and gently colliding on an astral plane that’s removed from the confines of this planet and the routine cruelty of its judgmental inhabitants.
Kambui Olujimi: North Star is now on view at the San José Museum of Art through June 1. Open Thu 4–9pm, Fri 11am–9pm, Sat–Sun 11am–6pm. 110 South Market St., San José. sjmusart.org.
