Conrad Egyir

Born and raised in Ghana, Conrad Egyir’s creative practice draws from a pool of uniquely coded Ghanaian texts and visually based language systems. In an exploration of relationships between his past experiences in Africa and his present residence in the United States, he is drawn to themes that define the past and present, the image and self, and predestination and free will. His practice analyzes the relationships between the semiotics and historicity of these themes as a grappling coalescence of postcolonial upbringing and western higher education.

Woven into his works are borrowed superstitious and symbolic aesthetics from West Africa, anachronisms from different cultures, and a deconstruction and redefining of colorism and identity as defined by Western academia. One parameter of this creative practice is to use subjects that do not fit in the timelines or settings of the stories Egyir draws from, often interchanging a character’s gender, social status, or age. Egyir often uses his own image as a template for his figures, making a singular image transcend a narrative - the individual becoming simultaneously the victim and perpetrator, father and son, friend and foe.