Collage – Inye Wokoma • Artist

My Final Inconclusions | Collage As Discursive Self-Inquiry

Liberation Ecology (Detail) | 2019

Documentary and portrait photography are my first and most enduring creative loves. They are also my biggest creative antagonists. I use the term documentary photography to broadly include ‘street photography, photojournalism, and editorial photo essays. Portrait photography is generally self-explanatory and includes almost every category that centers the human beings as subjects.

What I love most about these genres of photography is their ability to both render a clear vision of our world while also sparking waves of imagination and narrative possibility. The ‘truth’ in many of these images is as much a product of the context in which they were created and the projections of narrative and meaning brought to them by the viewer. Exceptional images toggle back and forth between telling a specific story and causing the viewer to imagine more stories behind the one apparently being told. I love the simplicity and depth of this unassuming power in photography.

It is this simplicity that is a bane for my creative spirit. I think about the world, experiences and ideas as sites for multivalent possibilities. For me no idea, experience, story, event, or concept is ever limited to one interpretation, meaning or possibility. Interpretation, meaning, and possibility are transmogrifying qualities. As soon as I land at one focal point, it becomes the lens through which I am called to survey all of the other meanings and possibilities it implies. For me this disposition, as a viewer, makes photographs magical and infinite storytelling devices. As an artist who grapples with stories and ideas in multivalent ways, photographs reach a definite point of limitation. The way they function in the world is too literal for the scope of my imaginal leanings.

Given that my creative impulses are anchored in, but not limited to subjective reality, I have always had an equal attraction to documentary photography and photo-collage. Long before I took up photography I was an avid drawer, writer, and poet in my youth. As a child I had a practice that I might describe as a ‘temporal sculpturalist’. I would spend long afternoons building artifices in my bedroom. It would often start with

looking at a random object and imagining it as a part of something else. From there I would experiment with cobbling it together with other things. Objects that my grandmother brought home from her hospital job, items from my grandfather’s workshop, things laying about the house, my own toys and possessions, or just about anything that captured my interest or seemed utilitarian would be incorporated. Many times I had some final end point in mind. Other times I would just experiment with what could be done.

My affinity for collage is born out of this disposition. In looking at my own photography I cannot help but spin out narratives, ideas, questions and possibilities that the singular image cannot reach. As such I have always maintained a side practice of photo-collage. I started out learning Photoshop in the 1990s and used it at first as an extension of my drawing, then I dabbled in graphic design, later, as I became more proficient in photography, I began photographing people and objects as elements for an image I saw in my mind, a story I wanted to tell, or an idea I needed to grapple with.

The work in this gallery documents how this practice has evolved over the years. More recently I have incorporated more analog modes of creation into my practice. Working with physical material and my hand has allowed me to access untapped areas of my imagination. My brain simply operates differently in analog. Counter to the common wisdom of the digital storytelling age, I find working in analog offers wider and more complex metaphorical possibilities. The tactile and dimensional qualities of various materials, and the way they interact unlock storytelling possibilities that digital constructions just cannot approach. I am excited by this.

‘My Final Inconclusions’ is a nod to my embrace of every answer being the catalyst for many new questions. Every conclusion is the foil of certainty. My collages are often autobiographical. Not in a temporal way, but in a meaning way. They are a way for me to unpack, deconstruct and reassemble the the ways I understand my life on this Planet Earth.