TIME OUT
This series is a psychotherapy visual representation of the meaning of being (life) and existence. I was a teenager (17yrs old) when my father died and as the first child of my mother, I became the father and brother to my siblings, ‘husband’ to my mother. The better part of my childhood was traded for the happiness of the other. Being the first child of my mother, seventh of my father – in a complicated socio-cultural matrix of my upbringing, my options were limited. It’s been a battle to overcome challenges in a quest for survival of both personal and the larger family structure.
Locked within me for months, searching for a “way out”, I found a glimpse in my name: Aderemilekun – “he has come to SOOTHE my SORROW.” It is not consoling to realize that the meaning of my name is a precast to support others’ lives. In the collapse of my uncle’s photographs and my photographs, I found “time-out” – ventilation of a forlorn state.
In my maternal Uncle’s trajectory, I found common realities and his images served as motifs for me to relieve myself from the deadly world of depression.
