BENDING THE EVERYDAY, REMAKING THE MUNDANE – IN TOUCH EDITION 6 PART II
Our second installment of In Touch Edition 6, looks at some of the cutting-edge work that the participating galleries are showcasing
Looking at the coming together of the visceral and peripheral, the mundane and the extraordinary we examine a series of four exhibitions at In Touch Edition 6 that put an interesting spin on the ordinary.
Experimenter presents ‘Lived Spaces and Other Structures’, a two-person exhibition by Julien Segard and Rathin Barman, for In Touch Edition 6. The exhibition features some evocative works on paper, paintings and sculptures.
“The exhibition builds a dialogue between landscape, architecture and the built environment”
-Prateek Raja
Segard’s work explores the severe edges perpetuated by urban structures, free flowing contours of nature’s invasion into these structures and the shared intimacy that grow into each other’s spaces and claim each as their own. He reveals glaring blind-spots in our vision of the landscape and builds a thread of connections through works on paper and paintings.
Barman has been exploring the nature of built structures and what lies beyond the visible, for a decade now. Applying an anthropological lens in sculpting and drawing, he forms long-lasting relationships with inhabitants of old homes in North Kolkata, which are in various stages of disrepair, demolition and have long lost their past grandeur. The artist explores personal histories and relationships of the inmates to their homes through sculptural materials such as concrete, iron and brass.
Gallery Chemould Prescott features a two-person show showcasing the works of artists Ritesh Meshram and L N Tallur who engage in a careful dialogue with metals and found objects, investigating and responding to each material’s qualities.
Meshram works at refashioning familiar objects, that he transforms and assigns them a new value and meaning. He combines, bends, twists, crushes and detaches them to give them a fresh life as a work of art. Be it utensils, surgical tools, or other domestic items, he takes them apart, piece by piece. He achieves fragility and lightness and a soft delicacy with metal; as he investigates what happens when the mundane is remade in a surprising scale or form.
Through his recreation of commercial antiques and statues, L N Tallur similarly interrogates familiar imagery. He challenges different metals and their conceptual limits, as he mimics portions of statues and morphs the rest with other materials. Dramatic, textural, and organic in appearance, his hybrid figures boldly contrast their industrial origin.
Tara Kelton, an Indian-American artist based in Bangalore, brings together three bodies of works under the title Islands, showing at Gallery Ske. Each section of the exhibition casts a unique lens onto the idea of the landscape as it is mediated through digital technologies.
Developed during the past year, as the covid-19 pandemic reshaped one’s relationship to the environment; these works reflect on representations of the ‘natural’ within our increasingly virtual existences.
In her series of drawings, Flowers, Kelton draws from her visits to the popular VR platform ‘Sansar.’ Wearing a VR headset, Kelton wandered through virtual worlds while creating drawings on physical paper. In the installation Homeward, a portable projector sits atop a robot vacuum cleaner, playing a looped video-from ‘virtual nature walk,’ DVDs (that normally play on screens attached to treadmills). The Roomba wanders across the floor with the video being projected on the wall before it. As it moves around, the idealized virtual landscape and the physical space of the gallery collapse.
Featured at Gallery Isabelle Van Den Eynde, are the works of Dubai-based Artist Hesam Rahmanian. At first glance, the raw materials of the Knoxville-born Rahmanian appear as fragments of his daily life. However, it is part of his solo Absent-Minded Geometry. A hardened smear of acrylic paint, pages from a discarded magazine, a forgotten tangle of stainless-steel pot cleaners and weary sunglasses; Rahmanian summons this unremarkable flotsam and jetsam of the domestic everyday, coaxing them from hidden corners and the recesses of memory creating a ‘portrait gallery’.
“There is another, more poetic sense of time in these works: of things as vessels of lived experience. Rahmanian’s assemblages pick up the residues of life as it is lived through and by objects, from the logic of accumulation to the inner life of things. The object, despite being detached from its environment, has preserved a sense of belonging elsewhere.”
– Media Farzin
Evoking an at once- Surrealist collage and the innocence of pareidolia (the act of discerning images, like faces, in abstractions like cloud formations or the lunar surface), these assemblages challenge the very notion of artistic mastery.
Catch the exhibitions online and tune in to the media inspired lives that have bent our lives into new shapes and formats.
Text by Georgina Maddox
Image Courtesy: All the participating galleries and artists of In Touch Edition 6
Find more about In Touch Edition 6, participating Galleries and Artists:
