Casey Carsel surveys the questions of visibility and legibility that play out across Unyimeabasi Udoh’s latest solo exhibition in London.
The title of Unyimeabasi Udoh’s solo show, No Vehicles, refers to the eponymous road sign: a white circle of nothing enclosed by a red border, marking the roads along which no vehicles are allowed to travel. The empty imagery of the “No Vehicles” sign leads by example, offering nothing in the hopes of receiving nothing in return, enforcing order through a lack both offered and demanded.
Core to the exhibition are five wall-based sculptures based on this sign. The retroflective glass beads that Udoh incorporated into the surfaces of these works cause them to shift with the light throughout the day. Sometimes, from some angles, the border disappears entirely, and what is contained appears to bleed, dangerously without prohibition, across the surface.
Left: Unyimeabasi Udoh, No Vehicles (Siren), 2026. Aluminium sign blank, cold wax medium, pigment, and retroreflective glass beads. Right: Unyimeabasi Udoh, No Vehicles (Sister), 2026. Aluminium sign blank, cold wax medium, pigment, and retroreflective glass beads. Photo: Tom Carter, courtesy of the artist and Alma Pearl.
The exhibition features works that expand out from this and other signs of legal and capitalistic adjuration. An exception to this theme of imperatives, though in keeping with the show’s deeper preoccupation with mis/direction, is Contemplazione: a rendition of a sign that marks a locality in Messina. Instead of an absence that requests the same, such a sign shouts of quiet to the uninformed reader.
Road signs, at their core, are fields of colour and symbol that work to blur experience into a shared understanding of the law and its im/possibilities. In their quasi-universal language, these signs offer unity and order, but the possibility of misunderstanding, alienation, and disorder remains. The translucent white text of Udoh’s Contemplazione gently emerges from a blue like that which, I imagine, fills deep sea. In it, and in the space between word and meaning that it offers, new narratives effervesce as both threat and promise.
No Vehicles also features “Diversions”, a series of prints that reflect and distort the poster—especially advertising—languages that proliferate London’s landscape. In this series, the marginal details, from which attention is usually diverted in service of the larger message, are brought to the centre. These details are often formed from layers—bird droppings on a window, the folded sagging of a sign under gravity.
From the early years of their practice, Udoh has been committed to such marginalia: the visible invisibles that clutter one’s field of vision everywhere it is possible to look. As such, Udoh deals in the negative, in the present absence around which discourse constructs itself, highlighting the “what is not” or “what is barely” that forms the pre-requisite for “what is.”
The colour fields that Udoh shapes out of negative space recall, for me, Ellsworth Kelly’s vivid canvases in which sensation is condensed and reflected into codes of gesture. Kelly’s practice was grounded by such codes during his time as part of the “Ghost Army” unit of the United States Army. In this unit, he and his fellow soldiers inflated the Allied troops’ numbers by creating decoys—fake tanks and trucks made from rubber and wood.
Through his experience in the Ghost Army, Kelly learnt to imitate weight and movement with the bare minimum, creating not just shapes but sensations and impressions. While he formed such impressions out of thin air to conceal a lack, Udoh’s work brings focus to what is already lurking inside the so-called lack, revealing that absence is just a matter of perspective.
Road signs, like Kelly’s decoys, bestow upon their maker the power to control motion and emotion: to assuage fears or heighten them. Like dressage, success is defined by the ability to direct the instructed as subtly as possible. It is not a neutral act, a sense that Udoh brings out in their incorporation of gendered structures in their works.
Four of the five “No Vehicles” works take a feminine name in their subtitles: (Milkmaid), (Sister), (Siren), and (Maenad). These often semi-mythical archetypes of womanhood offer space to interrogate what Udoh describes as the dissonance between the general perception of road signs as neutral or more masculine, and the fact that their most prominent designer, Margaret Calvert, is a woman. In this way, the questions of visibility and invisibility that suffuse the work here become gendered questions, too.
Within these civic and gendered systems, Udoh plays out the struggle of seeing and being seen, and the terms on which such seeing occurs. They open space for the signs and signals that encode the mainstream and its margins to take new meanings—meanings that, however, are not set. Instead, as the sign says, contemplation is the destination.
