Don’t Miss: Colour and Feel

Installation view of Isabel Okoro’s Colour and Feel at Patel Brown Gallery. Photography by Darren Rigo and courtesy of Patel Brown and the artist. 

My favourite work in Isabel Okoro’s current show, Colour and Feel, is a triptych called Living / Leaving (Space for Faith) (2024). The photographed repetition of a contemplative, regal central figure commands attention; and the fact that these three simultaneous scenes are viewed through a monochromatic “lens” of unique colours adds a twist.

Here, Okoro – who holds a B.sc. in Neuroscience and Psychology (High Distinction) from the University of Toronto and is known for her captivating portrait, editorial and film work – aims to provoke visitors to her show. She is inviting a moment of self-reflection as we mull over what emotion we experience, and why, when we see a certain colour coordinating with a screen-printed scene.

Okoro’s use of diptychs and triptychs allows for further probing into the experiment in colour association, as the photographer describes it. You might be surprised to feel differing pangs of emotional recognition when your eyes pass from the same shot represented in grassy green and buttery yellow, as in the work Forming Familiarity (2024). Okoro began the crafting the Colour and Feel series in 2020, learning to articulate narratives in a way subtle enough to entice but not unfamiliar to the point of opaqueness.

I’d never come across a collection of work with these underpinnings before, and was eager to chat with Okoro about the process of putting together Colour and Feel, which is on until Saturday, November 23rd at Patel Brown Gallery. A limited edition poster featuring the exhibition’s images is also available through her website.

OPALOMA: How did you go about selecting the colours that are presented along with the images in the show?

ISABEL OKORO: The first step was to separate and highlight the multiple emotions that could be perceived from seeing each colour. Obviously, that’s only coming from my perspective – people can look at the images and think something else is going on. But from an artist’s point of view, I first had to decide: What are the emotions are that I'm interested in comparing? What are variables? And then separating them.

Then I began to think historically and culturally about our associations of certain colours with certain emotions. For example, blue usually represents calm or fear or sadness. Red is usually love or hate or anger. There's a range of emotions associated with these colours. Looking at this image [she points to the work Straight from the Belly (2024)], I'm thinking, okay, she's screaming – what can this suggest to someone? It can suggest a cry for help. It could suggest anger. It could suggest sadness, loneliness, et cetera.

The colours I’ve selected for these pieces are ones that I feel will best give people a little nudge, or a hint in terms of the emotions being explored. I try to use colours that are very familiar – colours that are in our everyday, and that we would already have emotional associations with. With these images, what I'm more so thinking about is our own influence coming into the image. How does this red make you feel? Why does this red suggest one emotion and not another?

And I did a lot of research on colour association; I would cross-compare what different websites documented to try and create a kind of universal dictionary of colour.

There are several diptychs and triptychs in this show. Tell me about the singular work that greets visitors to the exhibition, called The Calm and The Storm.

For this piece, I was thinking about the subject; he's dressed in boxing attire – what could be going on in his head? Is he calm? Is he anxious? Is he nervous? The title of the image alludes to that limbo of emotions and allows the viewer to essentially impose their own feeling on the color and give it meaning in that way.

In the piece The Beginning or The End, you see a couple….

Are they an actual couple?

No, I found them through a casting. In the image, they’re fixed in the colour red, which can mean love, but it can also be anger, it can be hate. Their facial expressions are intentionally ambiguous. And there’s so much meaning that can be pulled from what could possibly be going on in this image. I like that dance between the different possible meanings, and then using the single colour to see how people's own context can contribute to the way they interpret or read the image.

Isabel Okoro, Forming Familiarity, 2024. Photography by Darren Rigo and courtesy of Patel Brown and the artist. 

Did any of the duos in these photos have a relationship before you photographed them? I’m curious about how that could’ve factored into the emotional resonance of an image.

Some people in images together are friends. The people in the piece Don’t Let Go (2024) are an actual couple. It’s funny – that day, I was only meant to photograph her, but he came to pick her up, and I was like, wait, I have an image in my head now….

I think something that was successful for me in making this work was getting everyone into the concept. Before every sitting, I would take time to explain this experiment and what it was I was trying to accomplish. I would explain the range of emotions that could possibly be pulled from an image to allow them to showcase that in their own way.

I wanted the images to be a documentation of reality, but at the same time, artistically, I like the idea of staging my own little vignettes and creating my own worlds and making sure that I'm in control of the narrative. World-building is an overall part of my practice. But these shoots were also very much a collaborative process, because I think once they got into it and they understood the idea, generally, I would set the stage and let them walk into it, and then they would embody that scene.

What did you learn about your practice from working on this experiment, and this series?

I'm very excited about the potential to present my images in a non-traditional way. For example, these are all screen prints on raw canvas, and this is something I've never done before. While I have a photography background, I love painting – but I don't really know how to paint. To me, this was a way to find a middle ground of, how I can bring a painterly approach to my images?

Materiality is something else that stood out to me. Moving forward, I would love to experiment printing my images on things besides paper – found objects, or different types of presentation materials.

I’m also into the idea of playing around with the curation of the work. I love the way that the images in this room all speak to each other, and the curation was something that I was very intentional about in this project. It has showed me that I need to pay more attention to it in my future projects.

And the biggest takeaway for me is that I'm excited to not feel like I have to create a specific type of image. I think this show has done well for me to show myself the depths of my practice and where I can take it.

Installation view of Isabel Okoro’s Colour and Feel at Patel Brown Gallery. Photography by Darren Rigo and courtesy of Patel Brown and the artist. 

Going back to the research component of this series, was there a nugget of information that really surprised you, or has just stuck in your head, when it comes to colour association?

What surprised me was the lack of actual scientific research about it. A lot of it was empirical and culture-based, and more opinion-based. There was one actual experiment that was done by U of T, so I returned to that often. Throughout the process, though, I think I was continuously affirmed about the importance of colour. Seeing that people have interest in it and realizing that it's something worth exploring and expanding on – something worth researching.

And another thing that that stood out to me was looking at the work of other Black women photographers that I had always loved – Carrie Mae Weems, Lorna Simpson, and Sandra Brewster – and thinking about their affinity to colour. When I read the exhibition text that Connor Garel wrote, there were a lot of race-related ideas in it that I was thinking about going into the project, but I didn't really know how to verbalize. I sort of shied away from it. But Connor put it down in such a succinct and clear way.

I’m curious about the feedback from people coming to see the show, because what's interesting about seeing these images is that there's a reciprocity to it. Something has to come from the viewer, too.

I’ve had a lot of affirming conversations with people. Some came up to me at the opening and said wow, I’ve thought about this but I never really paid much attention, or never really thought it was important. People are describing what they see, and it’s exactly the things that I want people to take away from the images. It’s like there’s a thread of universal understanding but also a distinct difference; not everyone is going to feel the same way about what each colour means.

And, as you said, it's not often that I would do a project like this that goes beyond the looking and asks the viewer to be a part of the process. I think it’s been great for people to have that internal reflection, and to highlight colour association as an important topic. My favorite part has been having conversations about what the colours mean to people, what the expressions mean to them, what they think could be going on, and seeing how people impose their own version of world-building on the image.

Colour and Feel is on until Saturday, November 23rd at Patel Brown Gallery.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.