Even in Arcadia, the idyllic landscape, where nature has regenerated after an unknown disaster, man has managed to create a self-sustaining paradise. Brooklyn-based contemporary artist Olalekan Jeyifous’ latest exhibition at Art Omi, an arts centre in upstate New York, Even in Arcadia… explores a utopian world where marooned communities have learned to thrive utilising the technology left behind after carnage. The richness of the landscapes and the characters that inhabit them invite visitors to look closer.

The art installation, an assemblage of photomontages, experimental video and small-scale sculptures on view in the Newmark Gallery “juxtapose picturesque portrayals of idyllic pastoral life with glimpses of a retro-futurist urban protopia set within the Hudson Valley” as described in the exhibition’s press release. The use of contradictory imagery—retrofuturist elements in an unspoiled natural landscape—prompts reflections on our contemporary condition, amid a shift in attitudes towards the environment and the exploitative nature of humanity.

Speculative narratives and alternate histories are a common thread in the visual artist’s work; he uses these tropes to explore the relationship among communities, architecture and the environment. This current fascination with speculative fiction and alternate realities could be said to stem from growing anxieties over the climate crisis and the potential devastation of the planet.

There is, after all, a sense of liberation and hope in imagining multiplicities. A similar sense of liberation can be found in tropes such as Afrofuturism (a label often attributed to Jeyifous’ work), which highlight the fact that history is not linear, and includes multiple layers, some of which are erased by the ones doing the telling. Understanding one’s history is not just an act of reclamation but a way to inform one’s future. In imagining otherwise, Afrofuturism asks, ‘Do Black (or marginalised) people have a future?’ And if so, what might it look like?

Through his work, Jeyifous imagines the possibilities. The artist reinterprets dominant historical narratives to create fictitious worlds outside common, linear perceptions of time, filled with Black communities and how they negotiate alternate realities. Through his renderings of urban environments and characters, he aims to underscore how this reality differs from ours. In a conversation with STIR, Jeyifous, who was trained as an architect, notes, “My artwork has always been centred on exploring alternate timelines. Early in my professional career, the label “Afrofuturism” was attributed to my projects and I embraced it as an accessible gateway to understanding my sci-fi narratives through the lens of my Nigerian American identity. However, as my art evolved and as 'Afrofuturism' gained mainstream popularity with films like Black Panther, I felt it necessary to further the dialogue, context and nuances of my work beyond broadly appealing labels.”

In doing this work, the concept of time as a linear progression from past to present to future is something I have always resisted. Rather than forecasting a future that is yet to unfold, I’ve been more interested in depicting alternate pasts that could have materialised under a specific set of circumstances.

As Jeyifous suggests, he has moved beyond the label. His alternative worldbuilding practice presents a way for visitors to critically engage with the histories they have been told and with critical issues like the climate crisis, showing how forces such as capitalism shape our perception of the world. As someone who enjoys fiction that deals with non-linear histories and the idea that time is malleable, Jeyifous’ work—which he has described as atemporal, surrealist projections—is a revelation, his worlds full of tiny details it would take hours to unpack.

With Even in Arcadia…, a pastoral reality coupled with post-industrial elements like rusting robots and bricolage machines, or in his earlier work, he presents wild new ideas for visitors to his installations to take away with them. Talking about his artistic journey, Jeyifous mentions, “My architectural thesis at Cornell University's School of Architecture examined how the Yorùbá cosmological belief of the ‘Àbíkú’' was deliberately misinterpreted to reflect the socio-political, post-colonial evolution of Nigeria…[It] not only laid the groundwork for my distinctive blend of digital/analogue collage image-making but the thematic and historical narratives I would pursue, reflecting my personal journey. To date, my world-building, speculative explorations have centred on Nigeria, where I was born, and Brooklyn, where I have lived for the past 24 years. In doing this work, the concept of time as a linear progression from past to present to future is something I have always resisted. Rather than forecasting a future that is yet to unfold, I have been more interested in depicting alternate pasts that could have materialised under a specific set of circumstances.” Jeyifous’ work is personal, drawing on his Nigerian heritage, but in its specificity, also universal.

For his exhibition at Art Omi, he draws on the often neglected historical narratives of the enslaved and free Black communities in the Hudson Valley, while the reference to Arcadia comes from the contentious history of the Hudson River School, a landscape painting movement active in the mid-19^th century that depicted the ‘bucolic’ American landscape. The reference seems to play on the many interpretations of Arcadia in art history and seemingly, a painting by Thomas Cole, Dreams of Arcadia. For Cole, the painting was meant to condemn rapid industrialisation leading to the depletion of the American wilderness by picturing an Arcadian realm of harmony. Jeyifous turns this idea on its head by depicting a post-industrial return to nature.

For the illustrations, he uses solar/salvage punk (futuristic tropes that inventively portray societies of industrial ruin) imagery to highlight themes of renewable energy, environmental sustainability, the imaginative repurposing of post-industrial debris, and the transformative re-wilding of [ex]urban spaces in the world of Arcadia. Elaborating on the presentation at Art Omi, he mentions that it is tangentially related to earlier exhibitions at Pioneer Works and MoMA. Instead of making an overarching narrative with an underlying socio-political/environmental message, for Art Omi, the focus was on developing a series of vignettes that offer subtle but evocative glimpses into a retro-futurist community set in the Hudson Valley.

These communities, as he goes on to mention, also draw on the legacy of maroon communities, which historically were enslaved Africans who fled enslavement by creating settlements in remote landscapes. It thus tries to trace the notion of resilience through history, here with the crutch of dated technologies updated for current use. Jeyifous builds on what he calls “Proto-Farm Communities of Upstate, New York” here with characters and scenes that leap out of the gallery walls. The characters range from robots with terrariums and bricolaged machine contraptions, to even cyborg beekeepers, forest foragers or ad-hoc alchemists.

On being asked about where he gets inspiration, the artist replies, “My creative and production process involves comprehensive research into the area's history, ecologies, culture and politics, alongside gathering visual references and conducting several site visits to photograph the landscape, local community and its exurban typologies. These first steps are followed by developing a very rough yet descriptive written list of the scenes I would like to depict, drawing inspiration from my collected images, notes and observations.”

For the Venice Architecture Biennale 2023, Jeyifous presented ACE/AAP (the African Conservation Effort’s All-Africa Protoport) a critique of the exploitative and extractive colonialist and neo-colonialist practices in the African continent. It imagined a future in which colonial powers had been completely expelled, leading to a new era of sustainable technological advancement centred around global hyper-mobility across the African Diaspora. In this scenario, he also imagined how alternate technologies might evolve because of Africa’s isolation from the West. For this installation, Jeyifous was awarded the prestigious Silver Lion.

At the last Sharjah Architecture Triennial, his work SHJ 1X72 - 1X89 (the acronym a reference to Sharjah and the numbers a possible year for the exhibit’s artworks) presented how the national identity and cultural significance of the UAE would evolve through the evolution of Sharjah. Here, his works focused on a community with long-held sustainable practices along with building typologies and planning strategies from very early informal Islamic urbanism to the 1960s. “Emphasising impermanence, adaptability, and scarcity, I was interested in exploring diverse design approaches that would embrace creativity and whimsy over rigid practicality,” he notes.

This element of satire, of an almost wild inventive vision is central to his work. Talking about his latest exhibition, Jeyifous shares, “This is the first time in my professional career that I've foregrounded a mythological narrative in the creation of an art installation. It felt appropriate given the location and natural setting of Art Omi within Hudson Valley—an area romanticised not only historically by artistic movements such as ‘The Hudson River School’ but also in its present, where it emerged as a refuge for affluent individuals to escape to during the pandemic."

Jeyifous continues, "Conversely, both historically and in its contemporary context, the idyllic perception of the region is clouded by some underexplored realities. In particular, the region’s complex history of enslaved and free Black communities, along with the current prison system, complicates its idealised perception for anyone who cares to look deeper...The exhibit confronts both historical erasure and the impacts of carceral systems, in offering a mesmerising view of the region and a deliberate protopian vision.”

What Jeyifous presents with his work is a sense of liberation, hope and an escape from the bleakness of the future. It acknowledges that neither the present nor the future is untethered, but depends on the entanglement of context, human, nature and time. In Arcadia, people mill about in the Hudson River basin. They live in stilted houses and ride hovercrafts, or robotic horses. Oyster farmers use flying cars as caddies for their produce while robots are terrariums that can harvest and transport mushrooms. Even in Arcadia, once ravaged by industry, nature and community thrive together.

The exhibition 'Even In Arcadia' is on view at the Newmark Gallery, Art Omi, New York until June 2, 2024.