Oluseye Ogunlesi (b.1986, London, UK) is a Nigerian Canadian artist. Using diasporic debris—a term he coined to describe the artifacts, discarded materials, and found objects he collects from his travels across The Atlantic—he explores Black being across themes.  These transformational objects are recast into sculpture, installation, performance, and photography and their explorations invoke Ogunlesi’s personal narratives and travels within a broader examination of Black Diasporic identities, popular culture, migration, and spiritual traditions. Across his practice, he embraces the notion of Blackness as divine, fluid and unfixed; unbound by time, space, and geographies. As such his work bends the ancestral with the contemporary; the traditional with the modern; the physical with the spiritual; the new with the old; and the past with the future. Ogunlesi has a Bachelor of Commerce from McGill University and a Master’s of Science in Entrepreneurship from Bayes Business School, London, UK. He has exhibited at The Albright-Knox Musuem, Buffalo (2022); Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto (2021); The Agnes Etherington Art Center, Queen’s University, Kingston (2021); and The Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto (2015).

Photo: Josh Rille