Aurel Haize Odogbo’s interest in collage stems from her fascination with her chosen medium’s ability to take a fragment of our world and breathe new life into it. Using hard and soft pastels, metal leaf, and bird feathers as sinew, the Nigerian-American artist stitches images from the glitchy ecosystem of role-playing games together with signs, symbols, and cultural artifacts from the Yoruba tradition in pursuit of something “angelic.” 

“Ancestor worship held so much power in my adolescence,” says Odogbo, who is transgender, when she calls from a “self-appointed” residency in Berlin. “It allowed me to believe in myself when I didn’t have a reason to, and when everyone around me told me not to believe in the young woman I was growing into."

The Baltimore-born artist’s fascination with the virtual also surfaced in her youth, when she would watch her older brother play classic video games on the TV—her face bathed in the flickering light of an alternate universe, entranced. 

These games became the “possibility model” for Odogbo’s life as an artist—they proved that one could build and inhabit another world. She found herself particularly fixated on avatar creation and “on the ability to design a body without the constrictions of our world.” She saw the voltaic screen of her monitor as a kind of “digital altar or portal,” a place to commune with a vast network of imagined forms. 

During the spiritual journey of Odogbo’s teenage years, her personal exploration of precolonial traditions and beliefs stood in stark contrast with the strict, prescriptive Christian religion of her father. The membrane that separates what we denote as “sacred” and “profane” loomed large in the 14 ambitious psychedelic collages she showed in “Quasiii—PortalsUponPortals,” her debut solo exhibition at Deli Gallery’s Mexico City outpost this summer.

In the show, her abstract meditations on the angelic and the alien relied on speculation as their primary narrative mechanism, introducing us to deities that wait in the far-off future, shooting out from the picture plane like solar flares from a neighboring galaxy. 

For more about CULTURED's 2023 Young Artists, read our features on Omari Douglin, Giangiacomo Rossetti, and Kahlil Robert Irving.