Sheela Gowda’s works have been shown internationally at reputed places such as Documenta 12 & Biennales, so having her first solo in London seems a bit late. At her first London solo Therein & Besides at INIVA Rivington Place, the Bangalore based artist showed two works. Apart from Collateral (2007) which has been shown before, she showed a new commissioned work Of All People (2011) in which she has best exploited her long experience of creating large scale sculptural installations. With her signature style she has used the everyday objects and materials such as doors and windows as her vantage point, combining it with abstract forms drenched with social references. Her large scale works have been immersive pieces focused on a particular material and its configuration in a given space.
She was trained as a painter and went through conventional training, which required observational and representational skills, making her alert and inquisitive about her surroundings. She was lucky to have a teacher like KG Subramanian who encouraged her to negate narrative in her work. In 1984-86 she studied at the Royal College of Art in London on a scholarship. She understood that abstraction is not the absence of form but more a reading of a multiple-loaded form. In the early 90s she initially cooperated materials in painting and then gradually went for 3D forms. She strongly felt that to be able to address/respond to certain questions and observations she needed new more appropriate language and this brought a radical shift in her work. It was the time of growing fundamentalist tendencies in Indian politics - which politicized people and as a logical result forced a critique/a self-appraisal. As an artist she searched for the right means to express that angst. Religion was being used as fundamentalist element to devour people. What could be better material than cow dung with its paradoxical context of shit & sacred. This very act of picking material with its multi layered meaning and investigating the void of the spaces were her few early experiments when she mixed cow dung with paint for her still very figurative paintings.
Even though the use of installation and other media art was getting its base in India with artists like Vivan Sundram , what fascinated Sheela most was not the medium but the material intercepting with the social, religious and the practical usage. Gowda's use of materials includes both an investigation into its physical qualities, as well as its source to mark another kind of change : urbanization in India.
The archeology of the material that marks that particular site reveals certain kinds of social practices and transformations. In Kagebangara (2007), she had flattened steel tar drums used as temporary habitation by migrant construction workers, a material pregnant with its own narrative. This work gives an insight into the process of how she uses a material as it appears in everyday surroundings, addresses it as sculptural medium and presents it so that as it does not loose its original social context.
Although she stresses her multilevel readings by each individual viewer, one nevertheless cannot deny the precision of specificity. In Of All People she has played with a narrative projection with little iconic wooden sculptural figures alias for people appropriated for voodoo. These wooden chips are then placed in situations illustrating varying concepts of the human condition. At a first glance it just looks like a pile of wooden chips. However, it is the time stretch of interaction and engagement of the viewer which makes him/her realize that these are individually carved unique figures.
The objects in the gallery space decoy obstacles and contradict one another. The striking colors happen to have certain collective aesthetic appeal in combination to metaphorical scaling of self. The dismantled vertical linear doorframe makes one walk through its own physical presence, defining the space beyond and before it/inside or outside it. Its disjointed relationship with the abstracted wooden figures makes it recognizable, subtracting a new kind of narrative. The image’s debated representation is different from the actual object, placing it in a scenario of a slow revealing process and provides a sense of recognition.
The process of making work in a particular space accelerates imagination. The artist’s mind itself becomes a happening site. Collateral (2007) was meticulously created by rolling; arranging and burning incense on mesh frames to produce an intricate pattern, precisely calculating the fall of ash residues suggesting a broken fragile burnt down landscape placed on three different sizes of mesh frames, suggesting notions of masculine, feminine and childlike shapes.
The work Collateral physically transformed in the space it was displayed. In this particular work the transformative moment had to be highly orchestrated and was also a scary due to the strict fire regulations in UK. It has a captivating tension around it. The word collateral means: descending from same ancestral stock but by a different line, like a collective population with a different genealogy. It creates a parallel correspondence for both silence & melancholia.
Although both works might look different they both are transmogrifications of material thus conceptually related. What it was and what it is now, indicates metamorphosis and connections with memory: the mark of time. She ruled out turning her works in to personal dairies during her artist talk with the curator Grant Watson. However, one can still feel loss as one of the underlying triggers behind the work that evoke something in each viewer. As she said, ‘I work towards layers of meaning while trimming the form to the extent possible, where the reference or the source is suggested but not stated literally.' Gowda seems to be working totally on her own terms in this exhibition.
In response to the exhibition a film screening was curated and introduced by Shanay Jhaveri, art historian. The films were woven around the notion of commitment to in/visible processes, the duration and skill attached to it, as Sheela herself creates objects of ambiguous amalgamations by infusing certain physical performative labour processes to locally specific materials transforming them in to ambiguous abstract amalgamations. Films by Harun Farocki, Ilisa Barbash and Lucien Castaing-Taylor, Wasim Mushtaq Wani, Ashish Avikunthak, Ayisha Abraham, and Avijit Mukul Kishore were screened.
The exhibition was on at INIVA Rivington Place, London from 19th January till 12th March 2011.
No comments:
Post a Comment