Working in watercolour and digital art, Nicola Frimpong explores the darker reaches of the human psyche. The taboo themes of race, sexuality, hatred and violence pervade her work. Cultural history is made personal through her unique and intensely felt perspective, which distorts and caricatures societal relationships to playful and provocative effect. Untitled offers a typically confounding image. Against a blank page, six male models face us, wearing outlandish couture adorned with incendiary slogans relating to race and slavery. The men appear to be of different ethnicities, and are dressed in a variety of modes: one wears black tie, another jeans and a T-shirt; wilder adornments include blue hair and an eyepatch, while one figure has a single wooden leg and hooks for arms. The signals are perplexing, and the childlike naivety of their depiction jars with the work’s subversive punch. Through Frimpong’s distinctive vision, we are displaced into a futuristic world or imagined realm where the norms of power and representation have been thrown into carnivalesque chaos.
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