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.