Ten larger-than-life portraits comprise this cycle of paintings, constituting a sort of pantheon across the gallery walls. Measuring at around 250 x 200 cm each, the works evoke a bodily response from the viewer, as though one were standing before real individuals. This subtle tactic draws us in, stoking our curiosity into these mysterious characters, who address us with their unflinching gaze from an array of richly patterned domestic interiors, rendered via many thin, watery layers of acrylic paint.

Upon sustained observation, however, the viewer may notice that the architectural perspectives are ever so slightly skewed. The realistically depicted scenes of African domesticity that we easily took for granted begin to fragment and flatten. The compositions take on a collage-like quality, an apt metaphor for personal identity that at first glance appears singular and legible, but is in fact infinitely complex and kaleidoscopic, contradictory and ever-evolving.

The title of the exhibition, Inner Circle, evokes this exclusive, aspirational air, while also alluding to the ways that imposed beliefs about identity, and the incongruence between how we are perceived and how we see ourselves, are often deeply internalized. The artist plays with this duality: the subjects are recognizable but chimeric, drawing us close but then not any closer.