Conrad Yaw Egyir
Region: MFA Annual
City / State: Bloomfield Hills, MI
Heavily influenced by a dense and rich art form of storytelling
in West Africa, my creative practice borrows from a pool of
uniquely coded text and visually based languages from Ghana.
In an exploration of relationships between my past experiences
in Africa and my present residence in the United States, I am
drawn to themes that define the then and the now, differences
and similarities, and the image and the self. My practice analyzes
the relationships between the semiotics and historicity of these
themes, as a grappling coalescence of a postcolonial upbringing
and Western higher education.
I create narrative paintings and portraits. Woven into the
aesthetics of my narratives are superstitious and symbolic
forms borrowed from West Africa, anachronisms from different
cultures, and a deconstruction and redefining of colorism and
identity as defined by Western academia.