Onwechi-Garcia’s hangings turn the gallery into a night-in-the-museum dream sequence. Her teal pastels and watercolours animate centuries of myth, mixing chronology and provenance. There’s a lifted Blake and maybe a Hogarth, and a paraphrased Goya. A broken Greek vase could be a source here, and that medieval illumination must have taken reverie to copy. These large, floating drawings, having refused their customary framings, break out in storied, fragile opulence.
Such fables are pure pleasure to narrate, yet their wealth of references overwhelms. Does the artist care for the history she dwells in, or does her maze confirm civilisation’s loss inside it? It’s hard to discern this from Onwechi-Garcia’s hand alone. Some of her characters take on a life of their own, others are stilted and composed a little too tightly. A set of Freudian slips —steel snakes, get it? — confuse transmission and fantasy emission.
