.Artist .Scholar .Activist .Experimental Curator

     Emeka's critical-creative practice consists of studio practice and academic research, and situates at the intersection of art and technology. In his creative practice, he explores themes of dislocation and fragmentation in the context of globalization.

     He works with different techniques such as painting, sculpting, weaving, repurposing of discarded materials, dyeing, gluing, stitching. Besides these traditional modes of doing, he also explores technology, and often combines it with the traditional techniques to achieve a distinct aesthetic.

    Some of his installations simply re-contextualize ordinary objects and complicate their meanings in new environments. In other installations, Emeka re-imagines urban spaces in ways that give new meaning to the notion of 'publics' and what it means to be in urban spaces.

     Since 2015, Emeka has been working with toothpicks which he first dyes in groups and glues perpendicularly onto each other to create portraits and images. While a few artists have used toothpicks to create art, Emeka is the only artist who uses this material and its painstaking processes to create 2d-looking images. By coalescing tiny objects such as toothpicks into massive, complex forms his work often forces a reflection and critique of the contemporary society that has been fractured by politics, natural disasters, and technology.

     Emeka's art demonstrates arrays of possibilities inherent in people coming together.

     His academic research is concerned with the general issues of interface, and specific issues of what he calls “expressive media” such as smartphones, iPads, and some computers that artists have been widely using to create art since the democratization of handheld mobile devices in the late 1990s. "'Expressivity' is an interesting way of thinking about our handheld devices which we often think of more in terms of their utilitarian function than as technologies of artistic production," he says.

     Emeka's research focuses on the ramifications of the mobile screen interface on contemporary artistic and curatorial practices because "the meeting point of mobile, handheld devices and expressivity is organic, problematic, and produces a range of anxieties."

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