In his Chicago studio, Nigerian-born artist Luke Agada gives form to adaptation. His paintings, surrealistic scenes painted in sunburnt hues of rust browns and tans, are elusive and chimerical. In these paintings, figurative beings hover at the threshold of recognizability, tendon-like entities suspended between worlds. Agada admits he’s consumed with visualizing a “Third Space”—a term defined by the Indian writer and scholar Homi Bhabha to describe the place where the two-way influences of the colonizing and the colonized culture meet. These spaces are both physical and psychic, and Agada’s paintings take on the metamorphic ambiguity of memory.
