Fola, Mother Nature The Overseer of My Journey (The Child's Point of View) (2013)
Folasade Adeoso is something of an online sensation. Fashion blogs love her, and in the blogosphere her work as a model with New York photographers like Kwesi Abbensetts and Barron Claiborne picks up thousands of likes, reblogs and shares. But there's another side to Fola, a side that doesn't "want to smile for your Nikon." For years she's been creating digital art on her computer and using the internet as a platform to exhibit. Her most recent pieces rework photographs which tumbl across her dashboard to create compelling digital art. Using precisely drawn lines and .gif animation Fola overlays Grace Jones' eyes with flashing flowers or obscures the face of an anonymous man cradling a child with a bouquet of spring flowers. Not wanting contemporary artists' work to unduly influence her, she studiously avoids their work, yet her reappropriation of ethnographic photographs seems particularly zeitgeist and situates her within the conversations surrounding colonial imagery and the new paths of circulation it finds in our internet age. Fola came to the Okayafrica offices to talk about her digital art, tumblr and Destiny's Child. Click through for the conversation accompanied by a gallery of her work.
