One of my favorite videos about music is legendary bass player Victor Wooten talking about the role the bass plays in a band. In the clip, he jokes about wanting to play complicated basslines. Complicated basslines, full of intricate patterns, leave people listening with awe.
But listening isn't the same as feeling. Wooten points out that complicated basslines may inspire focus, but they don't make people feel. The best basslines are the ones that you sink into. You hear the first few notes of "My Girl" and you're gone. D'Angelo's “Lady” comes on the radio and you're nodding along before you even know it. Good basslines pull you into them.
When I think about Everything That Didn’t Fit, my ongoing solo show that's been up at bitforms gallery in NYC's Lower East Side for a few weeks now, I come back to Wooten and basslines. At Everything That Didn't Fit, the walls are orange. They're a kind of rust-clay-red-orange, a shade that jumps out when you walk past the gallery. In that color, I've tried to pack in something like the feeling that Wooten's talking about.
For me, the walls are the color of the ground in my family's village in Imo State, Nigeria on one particular day. Tucked in that shade is the day, the region, and countless memories of family and my own history. Though most of the folks coming to the show don't share the same set of references as I do, what I’ve noticed is that nearly everyone who's been to the show comments on the color. "It's so warm," an interviewer said on the phone. (At the exhibition, one of my friends whispered to me, "I don't know how you did it, but this color feels so Black.")
I like to think that what they're picking up on is a feeling. They can tell that in this shade lies a sense of intentionality. There is a sense of place, a sense of specificity. It's only in the very specific that you can have anything like universality, and in that color is the connection — to land, to family, to belonging — that so much of my work pulls from.
I've been imagining the wall color as the final work in the show, and it plays the same role as the Wooten says the bass guitar should in a band: it supports, ties everything together, creates a harmonic foundation. For example: against its background, the wood-colored frames of the six prints of In Absentia feel grounded. They’re connected to a different land and place — Alabama, over 100 years ago, when Du Bois and his team first wrote their report on Black labor that the government would ultimately refuse to print — that that context feels unquestionably connected to the contexts I pull from.
Created over five years, the works in Everything That Didn't Fit are visually linked through a shared palette of shades. There are the warm and solid colors: the mustard-yellow turmeric spices, forest-green neem leaves, and light brown Bitter Kola pieces sprinkled throughout the installation The Hair In the Cable; the earthy shades of clothing worn by the women in These Networks In Our Skin, the gold of The Library of Missing Datasets v 2.0. And there are the darker, more neutral grays, blacks, and whites that characterize so much digital and computational technology and show up in all of the same works.
Compared to the years of thought, creation, and experimentation that have gone into every piece, the color of the walls seems like a small, simple choice. But that color is the refrain. It hums along to the melody of the individual works, linking them all together, providing the feel that initially pulls you in.
That refrain takes concepts constantly positioned as cultural opposites — the natural and the technological, the muddy past and the shining future, the concretely tangible and the boundlessly abstract, the continuity of memory and the structure of logic — and suggests that the swirled concoction that results from mixing them is necessary. We need it all.
In a world awash in information, I’d never expect folks to leave my show and recall all the details of every piece. But somehow, I don’t doubt that they will remember the color of the walls.
By the way, if you live in NYC and haven't seen Everything That Didn’t Fit at bitforms yet, this week is your last chance! It closes on March 5th.