Red Line Service, Chicago, IL
Is there anything more beautiful than the lake at sunset, picking up the ridiculously gorgeous colors of the sky, from baby blue to warm peach to bubblegum pink to vivid magenta? Self-taught artist and poet Marcela Adeze Okeke, a Nigerian-Polish, first-generation Chicagoan, paints a challenge to that beauty in "As Above" (2024), adding two men to the scene, knee-deep in liquid rainbows. Their heads are bald, their torsos thick, their swim trunks deep blue. Their figures interrupt nature and complement it, rippling the water, setting off its brilliance with mellow brown skin. Blood-red shadows cast from their bodies suggest, as shadows do, something unseen but remembered. Also unseen is the focus of the men, one who looks down, the other up, perhaps at birds circling above, fish swimming below, or maybe just sky and water. That could be enough.
—Lori Waxman 10/5/2024 1:32 PM