No Vehicles

Alma Pearl is pleased to announce No Vehicles, a solo exhibition of new work by London–based Nigerian American artist Unyimeabasi Udoh (b. 1996, USA). Udoh is an artist working at the forefront of sign and symbol in contemporary art alongside their attendant materialities across a range of media. This exhibition brings together a series of wall-based sculptures fabricated from materials commonly associated with road infrastructure such as aluminium and retroreflective glass with a selection of screenprints based on photographs of advertising billboards and hoardings captured in London across the past year. Titled Diversions, this group of prints complements and contextualises the broader concerns of Udoh’s practice and its engagements with the materiality of language, image and sign.

The meticulously executed wall-based signs, made using cold wax medium, pigment and retroreflective glass beads, are activated by light and perception. As viewers move through the space, their surfaces shift in appearance—alternately luminous, opaque, or seemingly void. Subtle gradations of tone destabilise the surface, producing a flickering effect that resists a fixed reading, thus revealing the polysemy of the seemingly universal fluency of the pictographic image. With their low-contrast, waxen surfaces, these signs become estranged from their functional origins and instead operate as propositions about the absence of direction, the ordering of space, and ultimately the politics of visibility.