While my father was in Ghana visiting us and his new grand son we occasionally looked at ways of getting out of the resort and doing something interesting. It was not easy it was the high season with the holidays and a lot of my time when guests were not around was spent in admin and getting ready for busy weekends.

One of the things I really loved to do when I lived in Accra was to get out to different social events in the art and music community. One place that always knows how to throw a great gallery opening is Gallery 1957 in Kempenski Hotel. They always have a good rotation of regional and local artists through their gallery spaces. They have 3 gallery spaces on the property and then there is another gallery called Amba so there is always plenty of art to see.

When Gallery 1957 does an opening they usually have a talk with the artist and then everyone moves to the gallery. When at the gallery trays of wine start making rotation and then plenty of finger foods, all completely free. Can you see why I am a fan now? We did not attend the artist talk because with our new little guy the attention span just was not there. So we got to Kempenski a little early though and had to kill some time so we went to Amba gallery first and then walked around for a while until the art talk was done.

This Exhibit was by an artist named Jonathan Okoronkwo, and called Some Things Stay Broken. His home base is a large industrial market in Kumasi the second city of Ghana called Magazine. Magazine is named such because it is one of the biggest local manufacturing places of guns in Africa. But it is just a huge sprawling market of all things industrial, car parts, minding machines, and so on.

His art style uses these found and recycled items, he also uses acid and wood burning to create different finishes on them and large wooden works.

Each of the more painting like pieces still had at least 1 found object inside of them a head gasket, a bolt or washer it was fun to find them in each display.

The whole exhibit created a very nice aesthetic especially if you were to just read the description before seeing the work. It was very matrix like but still had a very real sense of art and beauty.

Overall it was a great escape for a while from work and that night we headed back to the resort about 1.5 hours drive.