Maria Ogedengbe

Exhibitions

Ogedengbe's work has been exhibited at the Centro Fotográfico Manuel Álvarez Bravo in Oaxaca de Juárez, Mexico (Bessie Mae/Béseme y otras, 2010), Lyons Wier Gallery in New York City (Autumn Art Preview, 2010), Leedy-Voulkos Art Center in Kansas City, Missouri (neoPanos, 2011), and the Visual Arts Gallery at the University of Lagos, Nigeria (Fabric Friezes, 2012, and Kampala Canopy, 2013). Series of her images were screened in the Chicago and New Orleans Billboard Art Projects (2011), and her work was selected for inclusion in the Atlanta Billboard Art Project's curated show, "Color Shift" (2012).

Creative process

The artist begins her mural scale panorama format photo projects through constructing an assemblage of fabric that is photographed in sections at high resolution. After the photos are joined with the help of design software, the wide image is printed and mounted on single or multiple panels or, alternatively, treated as a fine art wall paper and adhered directly to the wall. Many of Creyts' images are created so they can cycle across the width of a wall seamlessly.

Artist's statement

“Textiles offer a ready palette of pattern and color and fashioning things in three dimensions has always been a part of what I do. The formal structural language for fabric is one I continue to acquaint myself with: corded shirring, shell hems and ruffles, darted and curve-cut flounces, smocked tucks, box pleats... I adapt standard methods to suit atypical uses. The mistress of a country cottage in Kent, England once gave me a catalog of roses. Thumbing through, I appreciated that many of the flowers pictured were the kind with one row of petals circling a central mass of fringy stamens. The design of the frieze raggedy rose is like this. raggedy rose’s cluster of stamens was made with slashed tucks and the fringed wide wale corduroy and houndstooth check were washed and dried at the laundromat to make them look raggy. To better fit my long format, the rose face is wide and ovoid in a way that recalls the fabric face of Raggedy Ann. Broad ribbons of brilliant and toned-down greens were sewn face to face with one satin and one dull side out to approximate the varying color and sheen on the front and back of leaves. Loosely suggesting foliage, the sweeping doubled up ribbons add a quality of a crest owing to their symmetry. Sometimes I am asked what aspect of my work constitutes the original. While the photo project depicts a subject I create, I revise its composition in a variety of ways so that it becomes more complex than the assemblage. In this way both results of the process are unique, and the photo frieze is not a mere reproduction This appreciation for my production is supported by Baudrillard in his assertion that the simulacrum (likeness) is not a copy of the real, but a truth of its own.” – Maria Ogedengbe