ABOUT
Ireoluwatoni Asojo is a printmaker who received her BFA in Printmaking at the Rhode Island School of Design and her BA in International and Public Affairs at Brown University. Ire’s work and experiences are shaped by her multidisciplinary interests in policy, culture, equity, and history.
She uses silkscreen, copper plate etching, paper, and drawing to create visual narratives centering myth-building, race, and identity. When creating imagery, Ire pulls from various inspirations and traditions–from navigating space, her own Yoruba culture, blackness, and gender. Ire builds creatures on the introspection of the body’s connection to the land. Through the fictionalized creature/being, Ire finds possibilities to explore belonging and rootedness with the earth. Her imagery contemplates contemporary realities of creating home amidst violent dispossession. She uses masks–ways of covering or conveying identity–and mirroring as motifs to reflect on the different levels of subjectivity and facets of self. These motifs explore the role of the gaze and (hyper/in)visibility while being metaphors for race, belonging, and vulnerability.
Ire is interested in processes of transformation and layers. She often explores this through printmaking because of its ability to alter ideas, drawings, and images. The possibilities in iteration mirrors the cyclical nature of myths and story-telling–granting room for narratives that may seem otherworldly or are rooted in reality. Through possibilities of change, Ire seeks to uncover the intersections of story-building, belonging, and living amongst oppression.
