I’ve Arrived/ He Llegado
Over the Influence is thrilled to present I’ve Arrived, He Llegado, a solo presentation of new paintings by Daphne Arthur at the Los Angeles gallery. The exhibition will be on view from 12 June to 24 July, 2022. The title of the exhibition, I’ve Arrived, He Llegado aptly highlights the ethos of this body of works as a whole in Arthur’s native tongue, signaling many undercurrents enacted in these paintings; language and the etymology of words.
Born and raised in Caracas by her Trinidadian family until moving to New York at the age of 12, Arthur’s practice draws from her Afro-Venezuelan background and is centered on experimentation and transformation of conventional materials and forms. For her inaugural exhibition with the gallery, Arthur continues to explore the roles history, memory, and mythology play in the transformation or deterioration of the collective imaginary of the Black diaspora, but with an entirely different sense of awareness and confidence in the process itself.
Arthur masterfully conflates the most epic of discourses - perception, states of being, time, and space in each artwork, bringing together influences from her travels and concepts from ancient civilizations to speak to the interconnectedness of experience beyond boundaries; navigating the kinship between human relations and nature in the delicate thread that balances ecosystems of cosmic existence.
Arthur’s canvases encapsulate multiple realities, memories, and experiences in one single moment. Alafia, the first artwork in this series, combines actual space, imagined space, and a mixture of lighting and materials; recycled pigments even bear the dust and fragments of the studio space.
The individual’s connection to nature has slowly been lost and relocated as a notion of pastime rather than necessity. In the present, nature is all but severed from daily experience. Within the scenic splendor of these personal yet universal allegories, Arthur centers on the role that leisure plays in black political and racial awareness in the fight for civil rights and its impact on shaping class consciousness among African Americans in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
The artist’s curiosity motivates investigation and study, using her subjects to illustrate and probe perceptions. In the painting Apep, the artist presents the figure with the snake that she saw near her studio in New Jersey, before Ramses III's burial ground, which she visited during her travels in Egypt. Apep, the snake, appears in different mythologies across the centuries. In Christian mythology, the snake is the symbol of original sin temptation, and evil. In Egyptian culture, Apep initially represented chaos, the joint iconography of the snake and Ra together symbolizes the Ying Yang in the myth itself, creating a balance between both order and chaos.
Exhibition Dates
12 June to 24 July 2022
Location
Over the Influence LA
833 East 3 rd Street
Los Angeles, CA 90013