Object Name: Once a Blue World

Artist: Charles Okereke

Place of Origin: b. 1966, Nigeria

Date/Era: 2009 (2013 exhibition print)

Dimensions: H x W: 50 x 68 cm

Medium/Materials: Chromira Print on Archival Paper

Credit Line: Collection of the Artist

Water pollution. Charles Okereke utilizes the glamorizing techniques of advertising to create large-format, super-saturated prints of such undesirable subjects as floating bottle caps and the iridescent surface of polluted waters. For the artist, the crusty blue cap conveys ?a sense of a globe floating on the universe in her pristine state . . . not yet tarnished and polluted.? Yet, Okereke simultaneously acknowledges the artifice of this moment by capturing his own shadow as he leaned over this polluted canal in the Festac settlement of Lagos, Nigeria