Nana Frimpong Oduro and Pamela Council Explore Body and Meaning at Wa Na Wari

by Jas Keimig

Nana Frimpong Oduro's photographs are like fables unto themselves.

Dozens of arms grow out of one body, disembodied hands reach out of turbulent water, a pair of legs drags the top half of its body on the ground. Composed with a surrealist sensibility, Frimpong's images are blisteringly mythological and invite a myriad of interpretations — a fabulistic meditation on greed, the condition of the soul, love, or death. There's just enough space between the image and the viewer to leave many possibilities for its meaning.

Frimpong's show, "An Emotional Rollercoaster," is one exhibition out of four now up at Wa Na Wari in the Central District from now until Oct. 27. Also included is painter Breyahna Monet Coston a.k.a. Breeze, interdisciplinary artist Pamela Council, and ceramicist Djakou Kassi Nathalie (a holdover from last season's exhibitions). While each artist is drastically different from the rest, both Frimpong and Council harness disembodied elements of the body — hands, legs, arms, etc. — to signify exploration of self and culture.

Frimpong's photos occupy the main gallery downstairs as well as the walls along the staircase. Born in Tema, Ghana, and raised in the capital city of Accra, he first experimented with photography in 2018. Armed with a Tecno W3 — a type of smartphone — Frimpong started shooting pictures on the street and taking self-portraits. It was in 2019 when he finally received his first professional camera and pivoted heavily into surrealism with his work, using photo editing to multiply bodies and body parts into prismatic positions and shapes.

In "The Dying Tree," the so-called tree is a man standing in a dirt outcropping with his arms raised to the sky as if he were falling. Frimpong overlaid multiple images of the same man in similar positions over one another to create a tree-like appearance, with three bodies on the ground to signify tree roots. In "The Present Vs the Past," a head floats in a box in the middle of a body of water with hands reaching out toward the viewer. Frimpong's images are mysterious and, at times, unnerving but mesmerizing, pulling you in for further study and interpretation. But don't go asking the photographer to give an exact meaning to his photos.

"My art is a way to bring feelings and emotions to life," Frimpong reflected in his artist statement. "Mostly I say the creator of my art lives inside me and outside of me and I am just the vessel used to communicate what he wants to say."

Upstairs in Wa Na Wari's media room is a portion of Southampton, NY-born Council's "BLAXIDERMY Pink" installation. According to their artist statement, Council created the term "blaxidermy" — literally "blaxploitation" and "taxidermy" — to "describe their distinctive Afro-Americana camp aesthetic, which marries the absurdity and horror of the precarity of Black life in a colorful exploration of the material cultural, and metaphysical." That concept extends to Council's video work, "Talking Hands — Watch My Nails Don't Watch Me."

Installed like an altar, four screens feature the disembodied hands of Amber Wagner, known for the motivational videos she makes under her social media handle @jstlbby. Wearing long acrylic nails painted by nail artist Britney Fahie, Wagner's hands twirl phone cords, smush citrus fruits and kiwis, run over a sequin pillow, apply perfume, play in a fondue tower, crush flowers, tickle a beaded curtain. It's sort of like a kaleidoscopic ASMR video in the way her hands interact with the soft, squishy, messy materials.

An ode to Black femme aesthetics and self-care, "Talking Hands" played across the giant screens in Times Square back in 2021 as part of the Times Square Arts program. So, given that context, it's interesting to see Council's visual direction on a much smaller scale in a room at Wa Na Wari. It becomes much more intimate and personal, inviting the viewer to reflect on their own relationship to beauty and comfort, self-expression, and communication.

"I'm interested in how nails are a site — both architecture and technology — for ripe cultural conversations about the politics of beauty, movement, the right to luxuriate, surveillance, and so much more," Council said back in 2021. "With our nails, we can make our points clear."

Nana Frimpong Oduro, Pamela Council, Breyahna Monet Coston a.k.a. Breeze, and Djakou Kassi Nathalie's work will be on view at Wa Na Wari until Oct. 27. Check Wa Na Wari's website for hours and more information.

📸 Featured Image: "The Dying Tree," part of a collection of photographs by Nana Frimpong Oduro at Wa Na Wari. (Photo: Jas Keimig)