In Your Absence the Skies Are All the Same combines footage of skies from around the world, morphed into a central, slow moving, kaleidoscopic image. To create the work, artist Kambui Olujimi collected over 40 views of the sky, shot at different times of day under a variety of weather conditions in various locations, including New York, Cuba, California, and Detroit. Referencing a universal longing for human connection amidst distance and infinitely shifting possibilities, quadrisected skies slowly fold into one another to create an other-worldly dusk. Illuminating the screens of Times Square every midnight in September, In Your Absence the Skies Are All the Same speaks to the evolving nature of the current social and political moment with a sense of collective transformation and notions of interdependence across time and place.

“Hopefully, this work can serve as a pause or space for reflection within the whirlwind that is our current moment. It is an offering, a deviation, or potential recalibration of our baselines. As a kid growing up in New York, Times Square was a chaotic monster. There were huge kinetic sculptures, porn theatres, comic book stores, and a giant arcade. As a young adult, I always found that chaos calming and often wrote there under the lights."
— Kambui Olujimi.

For audiences at home and under skies beyond New York, the work will also stream online for the month of September, set to a mash-up of the song “I'm Gonna Make You Love Me” — the classic originally made famous by Dee Dee Warwick and later recorded by The Temptations and The Supremes. Combined with this audio, In Your Absence the Skies Are All the Same deepens its meditative investigation of longing and invites reflection on conventional notions of love.

In Your Absence the Skies Are All the Same is presented in partnership with Project for Empty Space. Originally presented as a large-scale installation at The Brooklyn Museum in 2013, In Your Absence the Skies Are All the Same has also been exhibited at Mass MoCA in North Adams, MA. A related public artwork, Where the Sky Begins (2018), is permanently installed through the MTA Arts & Design at Avenue I station on the F Train in Brooklyn.

Also in September, Project for Empty Space (PES) will present WALK WITH ME, a collection of more than 200 ink works on paper by Olujimi, all derived from a single photograph taken in the late 1950s of Ms. Catherine Arline, who was the artist's longtime mentor, friend, and guardian angel. This solo exhibition will christen PES’s new home in Downtown Newark and will be presented in celebration of the organization’s 10-year anniversary, from September 12, 2020 to January 4, 2021 by reservation only.