In Your Absence the Skies Are All the Same
“Hopefully, this work can serve as a pause or space for reflection within the whirlwind that is our current moment. It is an offering, a deviation, or potential recalibration of our baselines. As a kid growing up in New York, Times Square was a chaotic monster. There were huge kinetic sculptures, porn theatres, comic book stores, and a giant arcade. As a young adult, I always found that chaos calming and often wrote there under the lights."
— Kambui Olujimi.
Arts-and Intersections:
Community CohesionCollaborators:
Location:
New York, New YorkRegion:
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UrbanLarge Intended Impact Area:
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OVERVIEW
September 1–30, 2020
In Your Absence the Skies Are All the Same combines footage of skies from around the world, morphed into a central, slow-moving, kaleidoscopic image. To create the work, artist Kambui Olujimi collected over 40 views of the sky, shot at different times of day under a variety of weather conditions in various locations, including New York, Cuba, California, and Detroit. Referencing a universal longing for human connection amidst distance and infinitely shifting possibilities, quadrisected skies slowly fold into one another to create other-worldly dusk. Illuminating the screens of Times Square every midnight in September, In Your Absence the Skies Are All the Same speaks to the evolving nature of the current social and political moment with a sense of collective transformation and notions of interdependence across time and place.
ABOUT THE PROJECT
For audiences at home and under skies beyond New York, the work will also stream online for the month of September, set to a mash-up of the song “I'm Gonna Make You Love Me” — the classic originally made famous by Dee Dee Warwick and later recorded by The Temptations and The Supremes. Combined with this audio, In Your Absence the Skies Are All the Same deepens its meditative investigation of longing and invites reflection on conventional notions of love.