January 31 - May 11, South London Gallery

Curated by Ekow Eshun

Christina Kimeze’s work is kaleidoscopic. The naked eye must work to peel back each layer, her chosen mediums of oil pastel and oil stick lay like thin sheets of jewel-toned, neon tissue paper on suede matboard. In her show Between Wood and Wheel at South London Gallery, Kimeze has created a world of the "in-between", somewhere between the folds of a viscously slow summer’s day in the sun. As a viewer, one feels like a bird navigating a flight in a tropical canopy. And this feeling of flow and flight makes sense, Kimeze’s primary inspiration for Between Wood and Wheel roller-skating within London’s Black community. The show’s title is a reference to the poem "Night at the Roller Palace" by January Gill O’Neil.

You glide like Mercury or Apollo Ono
without wings or skin suit, in low-rider jeans
that hug your body like you hug corners,
pass them all on the smoothed-out parquet floor,
worn down by time and rhythm. The trick is
to make it look effortless, remind them that
your quickness is a kind of love. You are the spark
between wood and wheel.

Roller-skating is a joyous activity– it is exhilarating, freeing. The passage of time is distorted when one has mastered the skill, hours tumble by as wheel repeatedly meets wood with each glide. It is no wonder that Kimeze has found the same freedom within her work. With each stroke, it is evident that the artist has lost herself within the process of art-making. As an artist, this is perhaps the most joyous part of a craft; it is the compulsory need to create, the impulse so strong the work flows uncontrollably, frantically out and onto the canvas. In a work like Soaring (IV), this spiral of creative passion is nearly visceral. Hazy, ghoulish faces materialize in thick strokes of violet, canary, and fuschia. While each are distinct in feature and color, they do not stand out as individual presences, but rather as one unanimous entity–background meeting foreground, warping the viewer’s perceptions of horizon and depth. The large patch of fuschia in the upper-left is perhaps what seizes one’s attention the most. It illuminates the figures below like a rosy glowing ember.

Ekow Eshun has curated Kimeze’s work with a sense of regality, the Fire Station galleries of South London Gallery fitting for her work. Kimeze’s pieces are mostly large-scale, so polished wooden floors, tall ceilings, and natural light pouring in from glass panels above appropriately house the ethereal, transcendental nature of her work. Kimeze and Eshun are a perfect pair, the artist’s work falling in line with the curator’s depth of knowledge and dedication to the subject of Afrofuturism (his exhibition In the Black Fantastic at the Hayward Gallery in 2022 was a triumph). Kimeze’s work is fantastical, mythical even. It carries the philosophies of Afrofuturism effervescently. What aesthetics can be found in the margins? What freedom? What beauty? Roller-skating, art-making— these are things that cultivate joy. Despite hegemonic power structures that seek to destruct this cultivation, there will always be facets that exist which imagine a future of belonging and, simultaneously, construct a present of identity-making. For Kimeze, this present is found in the lush colors of her pastels, these the vibrant sparks between wood and wheel.

Christina Kimeze: Between Wood and Wheel is on until the 11th of May at South London Gallery in Camberwell, London.

Christina Kimeze: Between Wood and Wheel

January 31 - May 11, South London Gallery

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