Gallery Espace is proud to presentGoing, Going, Gone, a group exhibition of works by Vinita Khanna, Sharad Sonkusale, Ganesh Selvaraj, Shubha Taparia, Kanta Kishor Moharana, Sukhadev Rathod, Ajay Kanwal and Smriti Dixit. The showisbeing presented from July 9, 2010 to August 6, 2010 at Gallery Espace, 16, Community Centre, New Friends Colony, New Delhi.
Going, Going, Gone is about the ephemeral quality of global living processes. The world reflects itself to us as an idea that rests confidently on stable bedrock. The artists in this show engage with that idea and turn it upside down. They seem to scrape out a patina from the surface, and expose the volatility that lies beneath.
Vinita Khanna's efflorescent blooms from white plastic trash are poised on buildings and lie obdurately in public spaces, like genetically modified vegetal creatures, markers of human interventions in natural ecologies. In a glance, she binds fragility and scepticism.
There is a comparable sense of vulnerability in the wispy paintings of Sharad Sonkusale. Using tonal changes as a backdrop for flowing cellular structures, not the kind they draw into medical texts, but more like inhabitants of a micro-biology bible. There is tension over a lurking threat, the kind of fear that becomes pandemic.
In contrast, seeing Ganesh Selvaraj's work is like ripping open an inner carnival, a twisted, striated splendour of muscle and tissue. Peer closer, and these slivers reveal themselves to be a porous construct, absorbing new influences and ideas. This texture then reveals itself as the artists' own metabolic processes that go into art making itself.
Shubha Taparia playfully skews the familiar. Her photorealistic work juxtaposes pavement squatters against high-end retail boulevards, breaking down, at least visually, the barriers in such public spaces. Will borderless-ness finally prevail? In front of our very eyes, we find that as nationalism tightens, globalization in its many avatars also becomes more firmly entrenched. Shubha stretches out this idea to its visual extreme. Kanta Kishor Moharana does much the same through his newspaper sculptures, where he both scorns the idea of truisms and reinvents what the news ought to be. By deploying this strategy, Kanta nudges viewers to see themselves as not as steady, rational beings but oscillating under diverse ideas thrown at them and indeed, very susceptible to externalities.
Sukhadev Rathod, quoting the surrealist master Salvador Dali, develops a landscape of isolation. Speech bubbles populate a desert-scape in one work, while an ear stands by itself in another. A single house takes up the frame in another, projects the idea of a non-community into the future, a fragment beyond recognition.
Ajay Kanwal says of his work, "My interest has always been in exploring how to stretch the limits of the medium I use in my sculptures to present new ways of seeing the real world to the viewer. So my work is realistic' but my approach to it via the medium used offers several new and interesting perspectives'.
Smriti Dixit pegs her critique ofcompulsive consumption through dresses and lingerie, fabricated from clothes' tags, that part of a dress that is both key to its identity and remains tucked away.Her works echo her own neighbourhood, where shop windows have changed from demure to brash, competitively drawing in buyers. The process of imitation becomes a process of interrogation.
Gallery Espace has chosen to show Going, Going Gone at a juncture when the second decade of the (once) new century has dawned. All around there is a palpable sense of fast paced change that dislocates our living present. We are aware of the fragility of our world, but it's hard to face it. Art brings out our inner thoughts, compelling us to confront what we sense.
