In The Sun’s Sister (2015), ruby onyinyechi amanze foregrounds her concern with metamorphosis and imagination as a lens through which disparate layers of meaning, histories, and forms can be simultaneously read. The world within the drawing alludes to a non-specific, boundaryless place and time. Instead, there is a sense of exemption, as detached characters float in a vast timeless expanse. Existing somewhere between constructed reality, fantasy, memory and imagination, these distinct beings find authenticity, wholeness and freedom in their ability to equally belong nowhere and everywhere. amanze makes paper-based drawings to invent worlds and conceptualize the shifting of space. For the artist, drawing is an apt medium for this quest because “it’s universal. It’s as old as time, older even than written language. But, at the same time, it’s constantly reinventing itself and doing away with former parameters of what it could or could not be” (amanze, Artsy). Nigerian-born and raised in the UK, amanze relocated to the US as a teenager. She went on to receive a Bachelor of Fine Art degree at the Tyler School of Art, Temple University in Philadelphia. She earned a Masters of Fine Art from the Cranbrook Academy of Art (Michigan) in 2006 and in 2012/2013, was a Fulbright Scholar in Art at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka. amanze exhibits regularly in South Africa, Nigeria, the US, and the UK. She lives in Brooklyn and is an artist-in-residence at the Queens Museum in New York.
This work was included in her first solo exhibition with the Goodman Gallery called Salt Water. More recently, the work was included featured as part of the exhibition "L'Autre continent, artistes, femmes, africaines" at the Musum Du Havre in France from 15 September to 31 December 2016. The exhibition brought together "women artists of the twentieth century, born or living in sub-Saharan Africa, who reveal personal and historical stories, told using various media such as drawing, sculpture, video or photography, installation and print."
