Ole Ukena is a conceptual artist that interweaves a variety of media including text, video, photography, drawing & sculpture. Ukena’s diverse media work takes various forms, bound by a common thread of complex simplicity. This unfolding dance between challenging artistic practice and innocent questioning of the “is-ness” of our world defines the very essence of his works. Ukena’s dance often mesmerizes as the juvenile forms an unlikely yet impactful partnership with the spiritually refined. With a wink and a nudge, youthful, playful enthusiasm confronts buttoned-up “maturity”. Sometimes poetically narrative, and in other moments purposefully reduced, Ukena frequently uses language as a tool to build riddles that await completion in the viewer’s mind. His choice of material and medium becomes a metaphor that challenges the status quo. And as his childlike game continues the underlying message invites the viewer into ongoing personal reflection.
As the founder of CRE8 Foundation, Ole engages professional artists and kids worldwide to create collaborative artworks. The workshops and exhibitions draw on collaborative creativity. This serves to verify the power and richness that lies in valuing diversity and authentic self-expression as opposed to conformity.
Archive for October, 2011
The story of a “Real Thread”
A piece containing text in combination with material can translate to a kind of associative puzzle that awaits to be deciphered by the viewer. The material I chose for this piece was carefully selected to reveal the story it represents, the story of its nature. Here is the story behind “Real Thread“.
Flying into Bombay over the years has been an astonishing experience for me. Right next to the luxurious skyscrapers and villas of the city lies something that at first seemed to me to be a bright blue ocean. All of similar size, next to massive highways, parks, shopping malls, thousands of interconnected blue squares lie next to each other for miles on end.
Later I realized that this “ocean” actually consists of the plastic tarp roofs of the slums that are interwoven into the urban fabric of the sprawling city.