Ephemeral

Curated by: Racheal Okogie

Time is fragile; it slips between our fingers even as we try to hold it. Ephemeral gathers nine artists whose works contemplate the fleeting nature of experience, memory, and identity. Each artist confronts transience differently, yet all share a sensitivity to the in-between, the space where things begin to fade yet refuse to disappear.

At the heart of this exhibition lies the work of Ifeoluwa Makinde, known professionally as makidamaker, a fine art photographer whose images explore the delicate boundary between the tangible and the imagined. His three exhibited works, Ephemeral Prism, Pause, and Point of Interest, anchor the show’s conceptual pulse. In Makinde’s lens, time is suspended; light bends, reflections shift, and emotion finds form in stillness. His images carry an almost cinematic quiet, each frame a meditation on what it means to pause long enough to see. It is through his vision that Ephemeral finds its rhythm, reflective, fragile, and beautifully uncertain.

Around Makinde’s stillness orbit the voices of eight other artists, each interpreting impermanence through their own visual language. Olamide Bakare’s Gele exposes the contrast between cultural permanence and bodily vulnerability, the strength and softness within identity. Racheal Okogie’s Hajia Funky merges devotion and self-expression, questioning how modern identities constantly shift in performance and faith.

Dauda Itopa Ova’s Odd One Out, a wooden puzzle piece, explores the endurance of difference, how something carved and tangible can still evoke the essence of change. His work embodies the irony of capturing impermanence in wood, a material rooted in time. Bukola Abiodun’s Lunar Frequency moves through cosmic cycles, turning human emotion into tidal rhythm. Anthony Anisiebo’s painting, The Leaders and the Coin, reflects on the transient nature of authority and value, revealing how power, like paint, layers and fades. Ibukun Oparinu’s Love is Blind closes the circle, a study of emotion’s volatility, the fragile line between clarity and illusion.

Mercy Odukogbe's digital drawing, Sisters, adds a quiet tenderness to the conversation. Through soft light and layered emotion, she portrays the fleeting bonds of kinship, moments of unity that exist just before they are altered by the passage of time. Her work reminds us that connection, though transient, leaves a lasting glow.

In Kester Kanayo Onyemaechi’s Power, light becomes both subject and metaphor. His lens examines control, fragility, and illumination, how the same energy that builds can also break. The image captures strength in flux, reminding us that even power, like all things human, is temporary.

Ephemeral is a conversation about the fleeting and the eternal. It reminds us that beauty exists in the temporary, in light that shifts, wood that cracks, and memories that dim. Through these works, the exhibition captures not permanence, but the act of witnessing time as it passes. The intrigue lies not in what lasts, but in what lingers.

-Racheal Okogie, Curator.