Page 114 - Sharp: The Book For Men FW21

EKOW NIMAKO FIRST DISCOVERED Working with Lego evokes that
his artistic aptitude as a four-year- old playing with Lego — early cre- ative inklings that led to a lifetime of pursuits, from drawing comics to playing music to writing fiction. In 2007, as a first-year visual art student at York University, Nimako was set on becoming an artist but wasn’t yet sure of his practice. But a pivotal moment that year helped clarify his path: the release of Transformers, Michael Bay’s
action sci-fi juggernaut about shapeshifting robots. Watching the heroic Autobots take on the evil Decepticons inspired Nimako to return to his favourite childhood hobby — playing with Lego — and use it in his art.
Nimako, now 42, has since established himself as one of Canada’s foremost artists. His whimsical, architectural sculptures reference African folklore and mythologies, exploring Afrofuturism through a surrealist lens. Ni- mako has even been exhibited in museums and galleries from Toronto to Seoul. Here, Ni- mako shares how his experience of otherness has shaped his practice, how Transformers changed his life, and how he built a career out of Lego.
What are you working on right now?
There’s a solo exhibition I have in Saskatoon in the fall of 2022, so I’ve started with that show for “Building Black Civilizations: Journey of 2000 Ships”. My Civilization body of work is what I’m focused on, medieval African civilizations and reimagining them in a different future.
I love the interplay of using a humble material like Lego to such impactful creative ends. Where do your artistic impulses come from?
I had a lot of fond memories of playing Lego with my best friend [while growing up in London, Ontario]. It’s interesting when we talk about interplay, because there’s this dichotomy to London, Ontario, which is hella racist — that is where my love of Lego was born in many ways; the harsh realities of the world also kind of fell upon me, where I experienced subtle and very direct, malicious racism as a child at five or six years old — but I’m happy to say that my memories of just being free to play and working on my Lego skills at an early age, that’s when it all comes together.
sense of play, I imagine.
Oh, definitely. It’s all creative play for me. When I was younger, I would watch cartoons and build; now I listen to audiobooks and build. That sense of wonder, things that can create various kinds of worlds in my mind as I’m building. I listen to Octavia Butler Star Wars audiobooks while I’m building. So, it’s typically a lot of science fiction and supernatural stories from a lot of Black authors.
You went to York University in Toronto for your BFA. Did you find your education restrictive or were you able to explore your creativity? I say it all the time: if you really focus on the experience on being in post-secondary education, it’s an invaluable experience, depending on what school you go to. It could be a terrible experience if you are not a fit at the school. I really, really appreciated my time at York. To be clear, I didn’t actually graduate. I was there for three years, I was a student there for BFA in studio practice, but I was also really into writing and reading a lot of stories, fiction. There were days before school where I was really consuming a lot of fiction and I wanted to be a writer. When I went to York, I knew I wanted to go there to get this creative awakening — it wasn’t always go there, graduate, and everything. It made way more sense to study visual art because I’ve always been drawing my entire life, but not really sculpture.
I went to York and found that I really enjoyed sculpture, and I even used Lego in school a few times before I knew it was a medium I could actually cultivate. I just had Lego, and because it was such a familiar material to me, when we got tasked to make a drawing in one of my classes in second year, I brought in some Lego and built this drawing machine. So I used it then and I used it another time to avoid failing a sculpture class. It was quite a tragic experience.
It was in 2007, the year that I went to school, that the Transformers live-action movie came out, the Michael Bay movie. I am a lifelong Transformers fan, so seeing a live-action movie was like one of those pivotal moments in my life. That pushed me to start playing with Lego again. When I was a kid, I’d watch Transformers and then I’d build and try and create things. After the movie, I had all this inspirational creativity in me and I didn’t know how to get it out. And then I started building the Transformers from
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