Abraham O. Oghobase at Smokestack, Hamilton
By Stephanie Vegh
Abraham O. Oghobase, Notes to Self, 2025, exhibition view
While orderly elegance prevails in Smokestack’s presentation of new work by Abraham O. Oghobase, this delicate balance is easily troubled. The gallery holds a gently swaying spell of white paper spilling in three rows of three banners, each marked by three crisp images. These translucent sheets hold the light and move at the slightest sweep of air. Walking between the two rows established by this tidy system creates the impression of being embraced, but also whispers a caution to move with care.
Notes to Self is the result of Oghobase’s engagement with the archives of the Herskovits Library of African Studies at Northwestern University earlier this year – a repository of materials held at the institution that established African Studies as an academic discipline in the United States. In Oghobase’s encounter with these archives, the Nigerian-born artist found images of Africa’s natural beauty complicated by a colonial history of resource extraction and human exploitation. The painful contradictions of this research have been powerfully condensed into stripped-down silkscreen prints, a process stewarded by Smokestack’s analog production studio.
Abraham O. Oghobase, Notes to Self, 2025, exhibition view
Each towering span of Japanese paper bears three deftly balanced black ink silhouettes, neatly spaced like the lines of a poem. While many are solid forms that evoke the heft of Kara Walker’s well-known silhouettes of antebellum slavery and its many violences, other icons among this company are punctuated with the fine organic tracery of delicately veined leaves and seed pods. These float above it all, free of history’s weight.
Even when reduced to flat shapes, the silhouettes’ edges are just as exquisitely detailed, down to the fine curling hairs of a man’s beard as he appears to fall backwards into the unwelcoming bed of the sewing machine below – or rather, a thing that reads as a sewing machine. Ambiguity abounds in the antiquated mechanical shapes summoned here from Oghobase’s archival sources, far outside common memory. The precision of these printed translations does little to clarify the picture – the letters AVERY incised into a machine that appears to receive a tumble of grain is just one more code to be deciphered.
Abraham O. Oghobase, Notes to Self, 2025, exhibition view
In contrast to these static images are figures paused in dynamic movement that feel more contemporary than the tools, machinery, and natural specimens that surround them. A note in Oghobase’s artist statement suggests that some of these figures may be self-portraits, though this specificity is lost in the translation from excerpted photograph to silhouettes. Rendered in the same language as his archival quotations, this self becomes something else: a part of the continuity of time that stretches between Oghobase’s present-day body and those of his archival ancestors.
A photographically detailed image of a record at rest on a cloth-covered table seen from above in a shadowed interior is displayed on the wall nearby. This scene anchors yet another triad, being flanked by two prints of silhouetted figures – one stands still, burdened by baggage; the other is explosive with dance. The pause lingers longest here, at this bridge between a heavy past and a future capable of joy.
Abraham O. Oghobase: Notes to Self continues until October 24.
Smokestack: smokestack.ca
The gallery is partially accessible.
Stephanie Vegh is a Hamilton-based artist, writer, and arts worker focused on communications and advocacy. Her drawings, installations, and book-based works investigate cyclical histories and human impacts on the natural world. She can be followed on Instagram @stephanievegh