NEW MEANINGS

A Solo Exhibition by Austin Uzor

Exhibition Dates: September 11, 2021 – November 6, 2021

Fall Gallery Night: Saturday, September 11, 2021, from 12 - 9 PM

“With everything that has been going on in the world in the last sixteen months, from the pandemic to civil rights injustices, it was important for us to reopen with a thought-provoking show that addresses these core human issues.”

— Lauren Saba

Fort Works Art is excited to present New Meanings, a solo exhibition by the Nigerian-born and Texas-based artist, Austin Uzor, who recently earned his MFA from the University of North Texas. The exhibition opens on Thursday, September 9, 2021, with a reception to follow on Saturday, September 11, 2021, from 6:00 PM to 9:00 PM. The exhibition will be on display until Saturday, November 6, 2021. Austin Uzor is a rising talent whose moody and atmospheric works are quietly revolutionizing the potential of contemporary painting. In his first solo exhibition, post-graduate school, Uzor transforms the gallery's entire first floor into a site-specific installation by building an immersive environment out of painting and sculpture.

For New Meanings, he reimagines a new space that exists beyond the confines of the self and the different worlds that we all move around in. At the age of 24, Uzor left Nigeria to live in the United States of America. Like many seeking a fresh start away from their old homes, he found himself caught in between two lives but still desiring to find a place of his own. All of his work first begins as a way to relive the past, as he paints from photo references of family and friends until his memories are changed by the interventions of his present brushstrokes. Images of those he’s loved and known are demolished until they become unrecognizable ghosts, but Uzor honors his personal history so that the ordinary becomes iconographic.

These vivid and expressively rendered paintings become temporary portals that reveal traces of Uzor’s internal psyche while also taking on a different purpose. Once known to the artist in another life, these haunting figures, collaged from influences found in Asaba and America, now arise as guardians to a sacred yet transient place. Arranged in triptychs and panels, Uzor’s fluid imagery wraps around the gallery to unfold like a visual diary. Through cycles of construction and destruction, memory, dream, and reality meld together to take on another level of significance.

In the current climate, where all our cultural identities have been thrown into flux, his work touches on the core of what the American dream is and what it means to be American today. Questions such as “‘Who am I?’ ‘Who are we?’ ‘Where do we belong?’” are central to the American experience. New Meanings serves as a momentary answer to these questions as Uzor invites us all to be part of this new world together.