Chinwe Okona and Sichong Xie: New Works

January 4, 2021 1:24 PM
by Clove Galilee

The City of Santa Monica and Santa Monica Cultural Affairs is pleased to present the culminating exhibit for Chinwe Okona and Sichong Xie, winter/spring artist-in-residents for 2021. The City of Santa Monica established the Studio Residency Program at the Camera Obscura Art Lab to support the work of local artists, highlight the intersection of fine art and craft, and provide the public with access to a variety of artistic practice and instruction. Artists are chosen for three residency periods a year.

Chinwe Okona’s work investigates the palpability of sentiment and nostalgia, and centers self-documentation as an implement of memory creation. During her Camera Obscura Art Lab studio residency, Okona developed a body of work centered around black life and leisure in Santa Monica. Thinking about both Santa Monica and Venice and their historical reputations as places of vacation, relaxation and play, her work in residency focused on bringing a more complex narrative to the forefront, examining the ways in which black bodies in this country have been disproportionately denied rest and leisure. This new body of work is a manifestation of her musings on black erasure and subsequent perseverance.

During her Camera Obscura Art Lab studio residency, Sichong Xie developed a new project inspired by tides and sailboats at Santa Monica State Beach. She wrote scripts for a play in three acts, which later will be presented as a multi-channel video installation. Her project presents solitude, nomad, and migration on the water in a non-urban landscape and examines our collective vulnerability in the face of climate change during the covid-19 global pandemic—as the necessity of migration has become a fact of life.

Both artists spent some of their residency learning new skills that deepened their understanding of each of their projects. Okona honored a life-long desire to learn to play a musical instrument, a new body of work informed by a desire to embrace personal pleasure and relaxation. Xie learned to sail and travel by sea, deepening her examination of water migration and the search for safety in the face of climate change.