NEWS: In Conversation – Joy Labinjo @ BALTIC

Image: Joy Labinjo, Talking into the night, 2019. Courtesy the artist and Tiwani Contemporary

We’ve all been there: it’s 2am at your parent’s house. You’ve tried and failed to get to sleep in a ridiculous bed – were single beds always that small? – and you’ve dragged out a family photo album to reminisce about your mum’s top ten worst haircuts.

It is this very sense of tangible, visual nostalgia that Joy Labinjo channels within her work. Utilising a recently re-discovered family photo album as her primary muse, Labinjo re-creates intimate scenes of close and distant kin. Her paintings flip from small, stolen moments of affection to kid cousins with larger-than-life poses, evoking a seemingly effortless sense of emotional intrigue with every stroke. It seems almost impossible not to study each painting at length: where at first the scenes seem jagged and unworldly, closer inspection brings out a depth of expression that can only be found within the blurred contours of an amateur family photograph.

By interweaving these pieces with subtle signifiers of her British-Nigerian heritage – her own upbringing in Essex, and her relatives’ lives in Lagos – Labinjo produces a body of work that is as wide-reaching and engaging as it is profound. On display at Gateshead’s BALTIC until Sunday 23^rd February, the artist herself will be appearing to discuss her work at BALTIC on Wednesday 15^th January, and we highly recommend that you visit with your own familial cohort – it might just evoke some lost memories.

Joy Labinjo is In Conversation with Elena Crippa, Tate gallery’s curator of modern and contemporary British art, at BALTIC, Gateshead on Wednesday 15^th January. Her exhibition is at BALTIC until Sunday 23^rd February