Office Man
This collection is a visual satire about a young man going through an existential crisis as a result of his subjugation to Capitalism, consumerism and societal expectations. The collection is set in the mind of the character(office man) as he is having a mental-breakdown, each piece is a snapshot of his mind and takes you through different emotions he's presently going through.
An existential crisis is a time of intense reflection in which a person questions the meaning and purpose of their life, in the case of the office man he finds himself in a situation where he has lost his true self in capitalism, institutionalized into the fabric of his society he was put on the hamster wheel before he could even know it.
Karl Marx's major contention against capitalism was how it alienates, exploits and enslaves the working class, he argued that there are two different polarities that a man faces in his life. One of them is between man and the nature. Marx said that capitalism has pulled back the worker from his essential nature of being social because he must constantly use his labor on one specialized segment of the work and so his life just becomes working on that product to earn wages.
we are encouraged to find one field, one set of skills and hone in on a single career trajectory. If we have multiple interests and want to invest our time and efforts into multiple paths, we are considered scattered and unintelligent. capitalist system rewards specialists and schools nudge us into streams of niches, This system is a result of the Industrial Revolution. In a factory system, production is maximized when one person focuses on one thing— like putting the cap on the bottle, for example. But what does that do to the human soul?. How much does that limit creativity, free thinking, individuality of being.
This collection is a body of work that started in 2021 and it has really evolved creatively just as i have grown as an artist, it is inspired by a lot things. It really started from personal and external experiences of worker exploitation, toxic work culture, and how it affected my mental health and perception of self. worker exploitation is something that has become so infused and normalized in culture and society today. In a place like Nigeria or most third world countries where there are more people than opportunities, the general ideology is "If you cant handle the job then leave it, there's always someone to replace you". This system keeps a lot of people stuck in jobs and roles that are detrimental to their being, because it puts you in survival mode. when you are in survival mode it is impossible to be really free, to connect with your inner child or to serve the desires of your innate self and this can lead to conflict within ones self as we see if the case of (Office Man).
This body of work is a result of many hours of research and experimentation, its very influenced by Dadaism a 20th century avant-garde art movement, it was a movement ranged in kind and was not refined on a single medium. when I started working on this project I was only interested in making the collages traditionally but I started to face some challenges that made it very difficult to continue creating traditionally, so I paused for a while it was in this period that I started to explore animating some of the traditional pieces and that just opened a world of possibilities.
This collection could really not be possible without my friend and collaborator Adewale Adeleke the actor of the office man. He really immersed himself and brought the character to life.
Some Photography From The Collection
(Exclusive this showcase is temporary.Taking this down eventually)
If you have enjoyed reading about this collection and the creative process behind it, you can check out an online exhibition currently on going bellow.
++All the pieces from the exhibition will be available on Opensea it is a very great way support and also invest in my work++