There’s no destination in daydreaming. It doesn’t have to result in anything other than you had a moment of reprieve. You had a moment of just being in a place that can hold you.
— Austen Smith, Imagination Doulas

The San Luis Obispo Museum of Art is pleased to present Outlandish, an NEA Our Town grant-funded exhibition by multidisciplinary artist April Banks. Including film, mixed media, ritual, and sculpture, Outlandish imagines a respite of mystery for those who most need it. This exhibition returns to and proceeds from ancient knowledge and harmony with nature, world-building an alternate narrative toward a freer existence.

For this exhibition Banks creates a place called Yemaluna, combining the name of Yemaya, the ocean deity in African Diasporic spiritual practices, and lunar, referencing the moon. Banks imagines Yemaluna as a cloud island, where everyone migrates every leap year on February 29. Clouds allude to the conjunction between the ethereal and nature, holding immense amounts of water yet dispersed with the wind, they are universal, drifting, wandering, and borderless. Like clouds,Yemaluna evokes imagination, daydreaming, and wonder. It is a metaphor for a geography of freedom.

Outlandish visualizes this network of exit routes including Apothecar(r)y (Bodies of Water), a staircase adorned with small bottles filled with water from SLO County, capped with rocks foraged from Montaña de Oro. These vessels are whispered with intention to safeguard against drought, thirst, and greed. The stairs depart to It’s Important to Me that We Know We Are Free, a meditative video work depicting Sojourner’s Proof, a Yemaluna archetype, swinging freely. Artifacts from Yemaluna adorn the walls of the gallery along with clay-pulled prints that reference Tidewalker, the sculpture installed on the Museum’s adjacent lawn. These objects of both labor and leisure conjure reciprocity and passage into new possibilities and geographies.

April Banks is an artist and creative strategist working across visual art, social engagement, and exhibition design. Her practice sits intentionally between image, space, and experience. Her work has been exhibited in Los Angeles, the San Francisco Bay Area, Chicago, Minneapolis, Cleveland, Daytona Beach, New Hampshire, Maryland, New York, Switzerland, Colombia, Brazil, United Arab Emirates, Senegal, and Ethiopia. Her work is in the collection of the Getty Museum and other private collections. April graduated with a Bachelor of Architecture from Hampton University in Virginia in 1996. She obtained a Master of Science in Environmental Design from the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena in 1999.