INSIGHT
Black And Queer Histories Merge In Oluseye Ogunlesi’s Playful Universe An interview with the Nigerian-Canadian multidisciplinary artist based in Toronto By Paul Gallant Photo by Josh Rille
“There are things I’m shy about, but no, I’m not shy,” the artist Oluseye Ogunlesi tells me. We’re on the phone while Ogunlesi is at a fabricator’s warehouse in Orangeville, Ont., where, a few minutes after our conversation, he’ll be using a flame-thrower to blacken the wooden frame of his latest artwork.
JULY / AUGUST 2022
I had mentioned to Ogunlesi that not only does he use himself as a model in many of his photographic works, but his Instagram feed is also a parade of gay handsomeness. But Ogunlesi, who certainly knows how to set a thirst trap, is far too savvy about his public image and his seriousness of purpose to dwell on compliments. Instead, he talks about how playfulness is a major element of his artwork. It’s true – even when his art is wrestling with tough subjects like homophobia, racism or the history of slavery, there’s a brightness, friendliness and sense of fun that makes a viewer feel engaged rather than scolded.
Lake Ontario, in Ashbridges Bay Park, from June 9 until September 5, as part of Toronto’s Luminato international arts festival. The cathedral-like structure allows visitors to walk inside, perhaps imagining they’re in the hull of a ship bringing slaves from Africa to the Americas (27 slave ships were built in Canada). But visitors can enter “Black Ark” from one side or the other – it’s a two-way journey. So maybe the sculpture is also evocative of a ship that actually took approximately 1,200 Black people from Halifax, Nova Scotia, to Freetown, Sierra Leone, in 1792. That voyage was led by Thomas Peters, an 18th-century community leader and British Loyalist who organized the migration to Africa after the British broke their promises to Black people who had come to New Brunswick and Nova Scotia seeking a fresh start. Ogunlesi’s interest in the various histories that have existed – and might have existed – for Black people in the Americas was sparked a few years ago when he visited North Preston, the community with the largest Black population in Nova Scotia.
“People want to be educated,” he tells me. “People do want change, but no one wants to feel like they’re being told what to do; no one wants to be made to feel guilty, like they’re not doing what’s right. “I am very interested in forgotten and neglected Black Canadian I think there’s a way in which you can get the message across in history because these are Canadian histories,” Ogunlesi says. “As a way that people have fun, even as you are inciting change. And a Black person, as someone who migrated here, it was necessary I think that’s what my work does.” for me to know what Black history had existed before my arrival here. In North Preston, I met Black communities that have been Born in England and raised in Lagos, Nigeria, Ogunlesi lived in there since the 1700s, and that’s when I advanced to another level London (England) and Montreal (he has a bachelor of commerce of my being Canadian.” from Montreal’s McGill University and a master’s of science in entrepreneurship from Bayes Business School, University His visit to North Preston affected not only his Canadianness of London) before moving to Toronto about a dozen years ago. and the subject matter he wanted to address, but his artistic form. “When I moved back to Canada, as someone geared to the creative Though he started out mostly painting, after the North Preston visit world with so-so French, Toronto felt like the right place to he started using found objects in his work – objects that might move,” he says. be considered garbage, like antique farm implements and debris collected from the street, but that have their own beauty as well The wooden frame he was working on the day we spoke is the as their connection to the past. With “Black Ark,” he’s literally skeleton of his “Black Ark” project, which will sit on the shore of manufacturing a sculpture on a grand scale.
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