In How Close Can It Get, Joseph Obanubi examines the city’s proximity to
populations and properties using digital collage and line drawings to reveal new
understandings of the psychic and material densities of Africa’s most populous
city. Over a period of twelve months, the artist went on walks around mainland
Lagos and would often take photographs of compacted buildings and a host of
visual elements that include hard boiled maxims, posted bills and hygiene
prohibitions. Drawing colour cues from Nigerian Naira bills, Obanubi then
combined these sets of disparate images into digital montages.
The resulting six images, titled Mega City Experiments I – VI, offer a visual feast
that requires considered viewing to make sense of as a whole. Each image is
dominated by the delimiting surfaces of story buildings that tell of closely packed
lives and livelihoods of city dwellers. Other elements that do not lend themselves
to easy understanding. The patient viewer could spend time parsing out each
element before coming to a conclusion of the picture as a whole.
Obanubi’s stated aim is to interrogate how “people’s experiences of personal
space are dictated by socio-economic conditions and wealth inequalities”. One
qualifier to Obanubi’s proposal could be that only the “poor” or less resourceful
are dictated to by their living conditions since a rich person could choose to live
up and or live down, while the less well off have no choice.
What is not clear is whether Obanubi aims for coherence or disharmony. In Mega
City Experiments V, the width of a rectangle curves into an oval which flattens
into a right angle and is pressed down by white space that is given form by the
rectangular frame. This is just the top half of the collage that is variously treated
to blind embossing, stamping and ink wash.
Neither are easy meanings to found in Obanubi’s ink drawings for which he also
employs blind embossing, as well as charcoal, pastel, stamps and coffee stain. Noone drawing is titled which adds to their elusiveness, but not for the careful or
informed viewer who will understand them to be road maps. They are in fact
routes which Obanubi took down on his photography tour around mainland Lagos.
Devoid of images, these drawings may not offer obvious critiques of urbanisation
but in their overlapping images, upturned inscriptions, disarrayed numbers,
circuitous lines and seemingly uncoordinated colours, they strongly portray the
dense urbanity of Lagos and big cities like it. To describe them as condensed
versions of Obanubi’s digital collages may relegate them to second tier status but
not to those who prize abstraction over landscape portraiture.
Asked how modes of digitisation has changed the physical act of collaging,
Obanubi says “technology is supposed to improve work”. The digital gains of ease
and convenience when sourcing and trying out composites outweigh any
prevailing notions of laborious accretion as integral to any final results. He goes
on to add that: “Improvement might not just be the word more like alternative
cos it’s art, the process and as well as the product”.
Advancement to camera qualities may face less resistance in photography but
painting is yet to make the big leap. David Hockney’s “Ipad Paintings” does point
a way forward but even his aren’t free from qualifiers. They come after a long
and successful career and the octogenarian’s adoption of the latest technologies
complicates the twinning of youth and restless innovation.
A harder question to answer is if digitisation is the farthest human technology has
come and will go? And if any new developments will only exist between these two
forms – physical and digital? “Oh well, I wouldn’t know” says Obanubi not to be
lured by philosophical enquiries into the future. How Close Can It Get is
resolutely concerned with the excesses of big city life as it is today, but the form
of collaging Obanubi has chosen is a continuous experiment: “I am learning and
exploring as I see where it leads; that’s if there is a final destination. I feel it is
unending at this point”.