June at Blue Sky
June Exhibitions and Programs at Blue Sky
Blue Sky is pleased to announce June Exhibitions and Programs. Please join us on June 6 from 5 - 9 PM for First Thursday Opening!
Ivan McClellan
Eight Seconds
Image © Ivan McClellan
Jun 6 - 29, 2024
First Thursday Opening: Jun 6, 5 - 9 PM
In-Person Artist Talk: Sat, Jun 8, 4 PM
The American Cowboy is an archetype. It lives in our collective consciousness representing the love of the land, care for its creatures, and the hard work that affords freedom. It is a romanticized analog in our digital age. Black women and men have been cowboying since the beginning and have a thriving culture today. Ivan McClellan’s ongoing project Eight Seconds aims to elevate this culture through media and live events encouraging young people to continue this legacy. McClellan does this work not only to disrupt perceptions but to celebrate this newly found part of his identity.
Mikael Owunna
Imagine Fresh Darkness
Image © Mikael Owunna
Jun 6 - 29, 2024
First Thursday Opening: Jun 6, 5 - 9 PM
In-Person Artist Talk: Sat, Jun 8, 2 PM
Imagine Fresh Darkness marks the Pacific Northwest debut solo show of multidisciplinary artist Mikael Owunna. This exhibition delves into a rich tapestry of diasporic African myths, including those from Dogon, Igbo, and African-American traditions, and features nineteen images from Owunna’s groundbreaking photographic series Infinite Essence and the film Obi Mbu (The Primordial House) co-directed with Marques Redd. This series began with an exploration of indigenous African knowledge systems. Owunna set out to create a visual style that would uniquely capture their cosmic grandeur, dense symbolism, and presentation of Blackness as the divine, cosmic source from which everything emerges. The predominant influences are creation narratives from Nigerian (Igbo) and Malian (Dogon) cosmologies. These sacred sciences are poetically rendered systems of spiritual and empirical principles organized around the goal of divinizing human consciousness. Drawing on their influence, this work similarly fuses art, science, myth, and technology to provide a vehicle for Black transfiguration.