Everyone's ready? Are you ready? I'm ready. You don't know? The sound of the camera. I didn't say it. Okay. All of it, then. First of all, I want to start up by saying thank you for inviting me. I'm very excited to be here and meet all of you and answer your questions. Where are you from? Where I call home is Inuguna, Nigeria. I was where I was born and I was there till when I was about 12. When did you come here? I came to America in 1999, right after high school. When I was in undergrad, I started off being a biology major because for as long as I could remember, I had wanted to be a doctor. But I had taken a painting class at the Comedica College of Philadelphia before I stayed undergrad as my fun class and I really loved it. So I decided to keep taking art. So it was just one of the things where every semester I had an art class and it slowly became two art classes a semester. Does your hometown from Nigeria affect you art? Definitely. With the work, I feel like I'm really trying to ask the question of myself, how can I stay connected to here and home at the same time? Nigeria is almost like an extra character in my work. Who are some of your favorite artists? Something that plays a big influence in my work is literature. I look to some writers just as much as I look to some painters. The top writers that have a big impact in my work, the first person would be Chinua Chébé, who is an Nigerian writer that has really plays the trail for lots of creative people coming out of the continent. Chimamanda and Gosea Dici is another Nigerian writer that has had a big influence. Where are some examples of pieces that you can say they have inspired you? When I think of all those writers, the one thing that ties them all together is that if we lot of them, the language they are writing in English is an inherited language. It wasn't the language of the place where they're from, but they're able to take that language and use it to talk about a place that the language didn't evolve in. What I'm doing is slightly connected because I'm taking a tradition of image making that I inherited, this specific way of figurative painting that comes down from Western European painting. So I'm thinking of how to take that and use it to talk about a place that it's not originally from. The way to achieve that is to crack that tradition and let something different seep into it. What is your art being? To explain that, I'm going to have to talk a little bit about this idea of the third space, which is a postcolonial term, but the third space is the new space that arises when two different places, cultures, traditions, clash, that space of overlap. And it's something you see a lot in postcolonial countries. Nigeria used to be a British colony up until we became independent in 1960. That cultural melange is very important to me and I'm trying to touch up on that in the way I create the work. I work with acrylic, pastels, crayons, color pencils, charcoal, I collage, I print. So it's a combination of painting, drawing, collage, and printmaking. And for me, it's important that it's a combination of all these things because I want the way the work is made to recapitulate the content of the work. In my life, I really saw my marriage. My husband is a Caucasian American. And I felt like in my marriage as an Nigerian marrying him, I really saw a marriage as a manifestation of this contact zone. So when I started the work, I was using the image of both of us, which you see the two of us a lot, almost like literally and figuratively as a canvas onto which I can project all these other ideas on. What is your art process? So I'll walk you through how I did this one particular piece. I love looking at painters I like. The art was someone I mentioned earlier on. And so I saw this painting and I was really struck by it. So what I really loved was how the lady sitting on the right, I love how she's this dark shape that comes down through her torso under the table, links up to the woman on the left and goes up the window. So there's this U shape that cradles this empty middle space. So now if we can go back to mine, you can see it's a little bit on the right panel. There's a table, of course, now I've added more people, but there's still that U shape around an empty middle. And once I had that basic idea, I recruited my husband who does a lot of the posing with me. I have a camera, I figure out where I want to take the point of view to be, and I set up my camera. And so I figured out the pictures, collaged them all together, and then started working. So that's the first step, which probably takes two weeks. In the next two weeks has to do with the planning of it, the sketching. And I do lots of things that look like this. You remember the v-yard painting I showed just how the darks fit with the lights? That's what I'm doing with these. And then once I pick one out, I start collaging, transferring, painting, and all the figures are just two of us. I'm the one sitting down, I'm the one standing in the background. My husband is the one bent over me, he's the one sitting with the sunglasses, and he's the one standing over there, and I just invent when I paint. What is your overall goal as an artist? For me, when I think of being an artist and success in my life and what I want, more important than a gallery or where you're showing or who collects your work, I think is to be respected by your peers. you