ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the interplay of printed text and image in the work of artist Kelani Abass. Since 2007, Abass has produced a series of richly multidisciplinary works using diverse techniques of painting, drawing, and printing; analog and digital processes of image-making; and recycled media. Framing Abass’s work against the horizon of broader histories of print culture, photography, and seriality in West Africa, the chapter examines the ways in which the artist, combining photographs from his family album with images, objects, and processes from his family’s commercial printing business in Abeokuta, Nigeria, plumbs the unique materialities and intermedial dimensions of printed objects. Abass’s most recent work cites and reworks actual artifacts that were printed using his family’s printing press; other canvases and three-dimensional wall-hung sculptures incorporate graphic and iconographic elements of a page that has been prepared for offset printing, physical elements of various presses, and taxonomies imposed by the spatial and material organization of the typecases used to store letterpress type. Still other works explore the ephemera of commercial printing and the temporal experiences associated with making printed objects. Interpretations of specific works focus on the meditation, opened by Abass’s work, on history and on personal and collective memory. I suggest that Abass’s works encourage us to confront and rethink questions of the archive and the transformation of so-called analog or predigital printing technologies through multiple acts of reinscription that expand our understanding of both print and serial cultures.
