Kameelah Janan Rasheed’s evolving series of archival inkjet prints, “A Casual Mathematics”, articulates racial inequality via the language of number. Measurement, approximation, and their signs and symbols are placed in relation to Black liberation, the ways society has been constructed, and history told. The “awful arithmetic”, in the words of one black-and-white text collage, does not lie. Yet, in the recombinations of phrases, in the leaps between lines, her latest body of work expresses how complex lives cannot be reduced to fixed formulas.
