Ori Meta…three artists share Salzburg experiences

An exhibition titled Ori Meta Odun Meta Ibikan, featuring the works-in-progress by Nigerian artists Kelani Abass, Taiye Idabor and Abraham Oghobase took place recently at the Centre for Contemporary Art (CCA), Lagos. The Yaba College of Technology alumni worked across three different media and undertook residence over a three-year period from 2013 to 2015 at the Salzburg Summer Academy of Fine Arts, Austria.

Sharing their experience, Abass who graduated with a distinction in painting said, the opportunity to engage another country and culture was a strong motivation, particularly, as related to his chosen course, Painting the Cliché, known locally as a Painter’s Painter. His objective was not to produce new works, but explore new ways of seeing, learning and painting. He took two things with him to Salzburg: a stamping machine and a local ankara cloth. He found the strong art history context through reading and analysing texts about painting and stimulating, coupled with the visits to museums. The biggest impression on him was the omnipresence of Mozart through monuments, street names, on chocolate bars, public square and anything possible.

Responding to his focus on one of the early music composers, especially as his birthday approached, led him to thinking about time (a thematic focus that is found in Abass works’ over the years) and about numbers. This resulted in him putting his stamp at zero and stamping 1,756 (year of the same paper he added a collage of other materials that feature the portrait of Mozart. This was the first work of stamping he created.

Photographer Oghobase took the course, The Possibility Impossibilities of Presentation or Reading/Making pictures: The production of Meaning. He explored, experimented and stretched the narrative potential of the image and in doing so to create new meanings through the intersection of painting and printing.

By challenging the attributes of a photograph, the veracity of the image, and its truth making properties he pushed the conceptual limits of his practice.

A new process was developed in collaboration with Abass taking his images of monuments as well as details of ordinary objects in his room at Salzburg from a digital photo to film to plate and to print exploring the process of lithopress as it relates to photography. As the printer separates the colours- cyan, black, magenta and yellow. Oghobase asked Abass to layer the plate with a bit of yellow to add blue to the cyan and a grey sky becomes painterly purple image effacing the ‘reality’ of the image. Since returning, his search has been to imbue the image and the photographic and printing process with new meaning and new life that are once poetic, subtle yet powerful.

Idabor chose the course Simsalaboom! Before you learn to fly, learn how to fall. This was appropriate for the sculptor who was using mixed media but was interested in taking it further by trying other media. The course’s focus on collage provided the perfect opportunity for a new direction. As she observed and interacted with her colleagues while they worked their process, most of them new to her, responded to her interesting not only in layering, cutting, painting, scratching, but also to the tactile, to the texture and to the three dimensionality with which she was so familiar in her sculptural work.

Her presentation at CC consists of self portrait in the Salzburg studio made up of several pieces to make a mosaic on which she is cutting, layering, pasting bits and pieces that come from all three artists time and experience of the residency creating one work in which three experiences coalesce.

The curator Bisi Silva said, “the exhibition is an opportunity to present within a gallery space the artists’ continuing process of developing their practice since the residency. It also offers the public a discursive platform to engage the mutability of studio practice, the impact of international residencies on the local art sector as well as the benefits at times the disadvantages of residencies”.