Zeitung Magazine
Issue 6: 01H 43M 57S
March 2026
Kayode Ojo is a multi-faceted artist from Cookeville, Tennessee. He explores the theatricality of artifice and seduction through his practice that spans over photography, installation, painting and sculpture. In 2012 he graduated from the School of Visual Arts in New York with a BFA. He has been featured in Forbes 30 under 30 Art and Style, and has had works exhibited worldwide with featured exhibitions in Milan, London and Berlin.
His recent solo show Black Swans Moan at Paris’ Blaice Hertling Gallery exhibited an array of surreal sculptures, all produced using ‘readymade’ objects that emanate the hauntings of our consumerist culture. Working across photography, video and installation, he creates a perverse connection between material and desire. The exhibition provokes the viewer to interrogate the art world’s role as the observer, consumer, critic and character. Lavish textures and excessively adorned silhouettes carry the artist’s narrative as he jests at the lewd cultivation of conspicuous consumption and makes us question why and how an object can be seductive. In our current climate, fast fashion and hyper-production concedes quality and muddies the hierarchy of object status. Much like the sensibilities of Duchamp, this exhibition attempts to subvert the stability of the art world by using itself as the subject of critique adopting a new attitude towards the idea of conspicuous consumption - one that is dictated by object and context, but smothered by pretence.
The material that fashions the sculptural ghosts are objects we are familiar with, however, their positioning subverts their identity from lifestyle product to art. Ojo uses materials that are mass-made and includes items of fast fashion as an attempt to de-centre the hierarchy of real and fake.
In art studies, The white cube theory suggests that by placing objects in a neutral, minimalist gallery space, their meaning is transformed. Stripped of their original context, everyday items take on new significance, inviting viewers to reconsider them through themes of desire, luxury, and consumption. Can we impose identity on empty space through the surrounding objects? Or perhaps it is within the empty space we feel most seduced by. Here, the gallery space presents Ojo’s work like the aftermath of a glamorous affair. There is an illusion of a human presence throughout the works, a sort of shedding of a second skin. Jackets are placed on the black of chairs, cameras are set down in quiet corners, shoes sit ready to be put on and garments are strewn across metal frames, as if someone had thrown them there. Instead of mannequins, metal frames and music stands create tensions that are almost anthropomorphic. If modesty, as many psychoanalysts theorize, is a reaction to desire, Ojo’s work could be considered an exploration of the unconscious significance of nakedness, dress and desire. The implied body created by the sculptural structures are merely a case of careful product placement, yet because of the space they interact with, it seems obvious as who it is that embodies it. In psychoanalysis, the idea of the ‘second skin’ is a psychological defense mechanism that individuals adopt to cope with challenging experiences.
His clever use of textures creates tensions of seduction. As we look and observe the sculptures, the tactile Shiny metal surfaces are used to create skeletal frames and are equipped with handcuffs, pen knives, keyrings, shackles to attach and connect the materials together, as if collected by bower-esque birds, drawn to shiny objects and nested in an armour that is solid but enticing. The music stands, postured as mannequins, suggest an embedded infantility within ourselves, undermining our conspicuous consumption with an intrusion of childlike insecurity. Many of the other sculptures that do not imply a body tend to use mirrors and chairs. These sculptures evoke a voyeuristic drama - is our pleasure derived from projecting our own aesthetic desires onto them?
The way Ojo’s refashions objects ultimately creates a visual prompt that exposes the mechanics of social aspirations. The fashions utilized by Ojo stimulates ideas of luxury and wealth that lots of people aspire to wear -slinky dresses, big fur jackets, bedazzled jewelry. If we decode them as a ‘second skin’, then the sculptures become an embodiment of desire where garments and objects protect them from their nakedness and vulnerability. But, since there are identifiers of who the objects belong to, no mannequins or models, the sculptures become a projection of the viewer's desires, revealing the futility of the art world’s obsession with surface and spectacle. In his sculptural work, Ojo seems to be adopting a new attitude towards the idea of conspicuous consumption - one that is dictated by object and context, but smothered by pretence.