Ye lijoch gize by Daniel Abera
Explore Mondoir Studio
Medium: Acrylic , marker and collage on canvas
Dimensions: 100 x 100 cm
Year: 2026
Price: $2500.00 USD
Status: available
“Ye lijoch gize,” meaning “Children’s Time,” grew from my reflection on childhood in a world where nature, tradition, and technology compete for attention. I wanted to capture that fragile moment when imagination is still abundant, yet the noise of modern life has already begun to enter the garden. The crowded screens rise like a second city, broadcasting fragmented figures and distant messages. Around them, plants bend, flowers gather, and patterned collage elements carry memories of culture, family, and handmade beauty. I used acrylic, marker, and collage to create a restless surface where vivid greens, electric blues, warm reds, and earthy browns push against one another. This tension mirrors the experience of growing up between inherited stories and an increasingly mediated reality. Even the televisions feel almost alive, stacked like watchful characters among the vegetation. In creating this piece, I kept asking what children receive from the world we build around them, and what might quietly be lost. I hope the work invites viewers to pause and remember their own childhood landscapes, while imagining a future where curiosity, cultural memory, and connection to the living world still have room to flourish.
Why collect this work?
Dark-outlined televisions accumulate beside bending plants and patterned figures, turning “Children’s Time” into a contest between organic growth, cultural memory, and mediated attention.
- Abera describes his practice as transforming Ethiopian everyday environments into layered compositions concerned with memory and collective experience. Here, familiar screens, vessels, vegetation, and textiles carry that inquiry without settling into a single narrative.
- In the photograph, the television stack echoes the blocky skyline above it, while stems and leaves thread around both structures. Shifts in scale make the screens appear architectural, even as small broadcast figures remain enclosed and remote.
- The documented acrylic, marker, and collage support distinct visual registers: broad painted fields, emphatic contours, and patterned inserts. Their abrupt joins keep the square canvas active rather than unifying its crowded elements.
- The work provides a focused encounter with childhood as an environment already structured by competing channels of attention. Its pairing of living forms, inherited pattern, and obsolete-looking screens makes changing technologies legible through ordinary objects.
About the Artist
Daniel Abera
Daniel Abera is an artist on Mondoir Studio. Artistic discipline: Mixed media painting. Based in Addis ababa, ET.
Nationality: Ethiopian
My practice explores memory, identity, and collective experience through everyday environments and objects.
