Exhibition: A Suite
Global mediums are giving us all kind of visual information in strength, manipulated by its own friendly ways and versions. This experience manipulates senses with such an authenticity that the medium itself becomes much more interesting than the ‘reality’. This body of works looks into poetess indoor-outdoor lives and values such metaphors.
My native place ‘Sihor’ is a small town in Bhavnagar, Gujarat. It has some very old temples, wall paintings, stone monuments, water tank and a fort along with the businesses of three generations and four modern Industrial zones. This place is full of interesting contradictions not only in their ground objects but also in their usage information, its practical aspect and its bold acceptance in regular life. Nathabhai creates his own hand made smoking pipe with the available wood stick and it works for years, a small broken bathtub picked from Alang junks, used brilliantly for advertising water supplier’s information. The people know what it means to be clicked. An old man asked me to show back screen of my camera as if it had to be a digital one to see how I have captured him – Am I worth giving a chance?
A Suite started with its Sihor reference and gradually made me more to explore and experiment with perspectives, disproportionate proportions, materials like fiber, melamine, plastics, clay etc to synthetic reality and uncertain surfaces, 2D-3D conflicts, physical behavior of persons and interactions with their immediate surroundings. Expressing by ‘self’ completes the intuitive part of the entire experience and nurtures it further. Becoming green eyed Gafoorchacha sitting on a small department stall is a different story than being a young Muslim boy sitting carefree and selling boiled eggs or unwell Ukabhai resting on a cot.
It does not take away the self and become entirely someone else but the real self do play a large role and this is how I enjoy it as I feel it is an important form of selflessness and selfishness towards creating a work of art.
Process of crafting every object to its gesture, extended skins and monumental clothing made more comfortable to continue further towards the painterly effects to these photographic pictures: presenting with no glass frames in good 3′x4′ size, helped see each skin, weight and volume.
