Recounting memories-spinning yarn, telling tales

Memory is never just a straightforward process of recording lest we forget and even in the best equipped minds, it can be a slippery mechanism.It can be both elusive and intrusive and we can rarely be completely sure of its fidelity to the events or facts that it recalls.

The exhibition "More Real? Art in the Age of Truthiness " in the Minneapolis Institute of Arts 2013 which featured  28 international artists, asked the following questions-:

In a world where new technologies can radically reshape the original experience being depicted, how do we define what is real?

How do we navigate between truthiness and deception in everyday life?

When can fiction be truthful?

American artist Mark Dion 's digs appear to follow archaeological practice but, are parodies of these practices by Natural History Museums.Dion makes us aware that while the traditional factual displays of museums add to our general knowledge bank,they are not as innocent and plainspeaking as they pretend to be.For instance Dion coopts Mickey Mouse into his installations on the themes of animal classification and extinction.To do this he creates a hybrid character Mickey Curvier, a fusion of the French zoologist Baron Georges Cuvier and Mickey Mouse.At the crux of this fusion of zoologist and cartoon character is the issue of turning nature into culture and the way that provide raw material for those coercive tiny paradigms that Disney (man and corporation) would impose on the world's past, present and future.His installation "Curator's Office " in the exhibition "More Real?"entailed the construction of a artificial office, a curators office in the 1950s disseminating a story that this office was actually uncovered.It was an elaborate work of fiction that manifested in a room similar to the period rooms.The motive of this exhibition  was to play with structures of truth  and what happens when it gets disrupted ,when we use forms that we trust to be untruthful or to use forms that look incredibly deceptive to be truthful.

Within the context of a museum exhibition,  Curator’s Office  is a “period room,” an installation of objects, furnishings, and architecture meant to illustrate a historical moment by re-creating its interior domestic spaces. Period rooms are popular museum attractions that are both authentic (in their contents) and false (in their detachment from their original contexts). As such, these displays pose complex museological questions: How does a curator decide which moment in time to re-create? How authentic can a retrospectively assembled room be? How does one maximize both accuracy and educational impact?² Because Curator’s Office highlights the ways in which one person’s obsessions, sensibilities, and prejudices shape a museum’s collections, it can be read as a metanarrative on the problems posed by period rooms. “Today’s museums demonstrate rather than seduce,” Dion has said.³ In Curator’s Office, he aims to do both. 

"Curator's Office"Mark Dion 2013

The exhibition "More Real? Art in the Age of Truthiness " in the Minneapolis Institute of Arts 2013 which featured  28 international artists, asked the following questions-:

In a world where new technologies can radically reshape the original experience being depicted, how do we define what is real?

How do we navigate between truthiness and deception in everyday life?

When can fiction be truthful?

Iris Häussler’s narrative installations, which range from the sweeping to the succinct, revolve around fictitious histories. Each project begins with a detailed biography of an invented character, which Häussler drafts with a novelist’s eye for detail. She then builds objects or environments that her characters might have used or made, and opens them to the public. Her best-known projects, The Legacy of Joseph Wagenbach (2006) and He Named Her Amber (2008–9), were elaborately theatrical, often unsettling environments in which viewers were guided through displays of sculpture purportedly created by characters named Joseph Wagenbach and Mary O’Shea.

Since Häussler is interested in the distinctions between fiction and reality, she does not immediately reveal to viewers that her installations are artworks. On the contrary, she goes to great lengths to ensure that they first experience her historical fictions as truth (later, through various means, she reveals their actual status). Although she is sometimes criticized by people who feel that they have been duped, Häussler remains committed to a gradual unfolding of her works that begins with “naïve, childlike fascination” and ends with a reconsideration of the work in its new context.¹ The entire process raises issues of authorship, artistic intention, and the constantly shifting boundaries between art and life. 

"Collection of Small Artifacts" 2010 Iris Haussler

http://archive.artsmia.org/more-real/preview.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LSfn73WCQEs

Smell of Roses

Memory can be invoked by more senses that just the visual one.Valeska Soares creates works that activate a range of bodily sensations, notably the sense of smell.She has made much use of fresh flowers in her work as well as perfume. Her work Vanishing Point contained fifteen large stainless steel vessels filed with a solution of oil and perfume which  impregnated the host gallery with an intoxicating smell.Her work tread the fine line between materiality and memory.

Valeska Soares "Vanishing Point" 2001

Other artists who incorporate the sense of smell into their sculpturesinclude Ernesto Neto and Montien Boonma. Neta fills his soft hanging sculptures with spices such as saffron, cumin, clove and aniseed. Boonma was a devout Buddhist, a monk and used materials like perfume and spices in his work to draw attention to the fragility and impermanence of human life and the concept of the transcendental.

Ernesto Neto's Plateau of the Human Kind, 2001 comprises of thin sock like fabrics filled with spices

Detail of Ernesto Neto's work shows organic shapes and forms

Montein Boonma "Temple of the Mind" 1995

 Montein Boonma's Temple of the mind: Sala for the mind invites the viewer to enter and experience a visual, spatial and olfactory relationship with the work of art, which takes the form of a sacred enclosure. The stupa-like installation replicates a Buddhist pavilion (sala) that provides shelter from the natural elements and metaphorically promises refuge from life’s suffering. The interior of Temple of the mind: Sala for the mind, imbued with the fragrance of spicy pigments, is intended as a place of rest and contemplation.

Smell represents the  changeable, unstable disappearing fragile forms of these artists highlight the passage of time.

Donal Moloney-Lecture by Visiting Artist

WWe had the opportunity of listening to the lecture of London based abstract painter Donal Moloney, and gain an in-depth understanding of his process of arriving at the subjects for his mysterious paintings. The process was equally fascinating as the works themselves. Moloney initially honed his skill as a painter by painting landscapes on canvases primed with layers and layers of rabbit skin glue, etching into the glue and painting over with oils, acrylics, charcoals, pastels in a free, uninhibited way. He then gradually started painting in a collage like way, combining images from various photographs randomly collected from daily newspapers, Google images or Arabesque catalogues. After a few years, upon realizing that he had a tendency to collect the same type of images, he decided to change his image sources. He thought he would generate his own set of referencing images, instead of relying heavily on external sources.Maloney then started constructing abstract sculptures from cheap plasticine, photographing these and altering them on Photoshop and then incorporating the painting of these images in his works. Or at one point he made hundreds of small, loose paintings on different mundane topics like - say a rock concert, photographed these paintings, photo-shopped them and painted from these, to create large works that resembled jumbled up jigsaw puzzles. This is his process even today. The end result -strange compositions where the eye cannot grasp onto any particular thing unless the paintings are segmented, broken up or very closely scrutinized. He describes his work as having a "floaty sense of confusion in and around them, they look representational but are in fact abstract” He said he t hides images so that the viewer is blocked by them and does not get an in-depth gaze.

Donal Moloney, "Shrines" 42cmx53cm, Acrylic on Canvas, 2013

I found it interesting that the intention of his making work was rather similar to mine :

1. unrelated images so that the images cancel each other out and dodge meaning

2. works hint at something abstract though it is something figurative

3. humor in his works

4.hiding little elements that would shift the reading of the painting once noticed by the viewer

5.playful approach to making because if he tried something procedural it would fall apart

6.slippery narrative intentionally hard to interpret

7.referencing something unrecognizable

Donal Moloney's work reminded me of Where is Wally illustrations by Martin Hanford. Wally books consist of a series of detailed double-page spread illustrations depicting dozens or more people doing a variety of amusing things at a given location. Readers are challenged to find a character named Wally hidden in the group. Wally's distinctive red-and-white-striped shirt, bobble hat, and glasses make him slightly easier to recognise, but many illustrations contain red herrings involving deceptive use of red-and-white striped objects.

The motivation of both Moloney and Hanford seems to be hiding things in a maze and challenging the viewer/reader to enter this maze, find these familiar but unidentifiable objects though this seems to be more impossible in Maloney's work. 

My work "Hope is the Thing with Feathers" ,handcut paper, pen and ink, colour pencil, 2014

I would be very happy to achieve even half the level  of complexity of Donal Moloney paintings  in my works, sometime in future.It is a skill that I wish to hone over the next few years.

Art Dubai & Sharjah Bienneal 2015

This year I visited Art Week Dubai-a week of March madness when the whole city of Dubai is totally submerged in art. I did an art pilgrimage to the Art Fair and took the Art Bus to Al Quoz District,attended Sikka Art Fair and Sharjah Binneale(The Past, The Present, The Possible).I must have seen 3000 works of art in 4 days including performance, installations ,sculpture and digital art.Some art was truly awe inspiring and some utterly banal.Some of the work was powerful on their own and some others the concepts were more powerful than the works themselves.It was an interesting , saturating,overwhelming and exhausting experience.The artists in the fair ranged from very established artists like Damien Hirst to freshly out of college like C Unnikrishnan and I concluded once again that not all artists were "special" but were at the right place at the right time and had been spotted, had established contact and built a rapport with curators at the most opportune moment.  I clicked pictures of the art that resonated with me.

mix media layered 3D narrative
What I liked-:complex narrative

color pencil on paper
What I liked-:delicate rendering of a open ended story

Pen & Ink illustration
What I liked -Hybridity

Yasmin Sinai-cardboard puppet installation
What I liked-puppets, feminist theme of a woman warrior in Iranian history

embroidered illustration
What I liked -traditional Iranian embroidery, saying something subversive

found object-fishing nets with shadows
What I liked-clever use of a readymade object

Samira Abbassy-autobiographical narrative
What I liked-powerful rendering

Abdullah al Saadi-assemblage installation of scarecrows with found objects
What I liked-playfulness

Abraham Crutzvillegas-assemblage with found objects
What I liked-the artist has created a perch for falcons his own way using objects from local souk,playful, instinctive

Reheim Alkadhi-eyelashes of sea labourers and twisted metal sculpture
What I liked-human hair is usually poignant when used in art and this was a social project 

hair of various people

porcelain sculpture of strange menacing creatures and forms
What I liked-beautiful, not so beautiful

abstract ceramic shapes
What I liked-the objects look familiar yet unidentifiable, I was thinking "what are these things?"

light boxes of images of destruction collected from the internet
What I liked-that lightboxes were used and the photos were appropriated

Papercut of currency
What I liked-imaginative use of currency

Mark Dion Cabinet of Marine Debris
What I liked-collection of objects , science meets  art

Rachel Lee Hovnanian Narcissus
What I liked-intricacy, so beautiful rendering and not so beautiful content

Artist Statement

I found this guideline in a art blog which has a checklist of key words for creating a coherent artist statement.

https://hapstancedepart.wordpress.com/2012/06/03/to-obscure-clearly-the-artist-statement-as-art-object-participation-activator-and-institutional-critique/

My key words are:

ephemeral, abstract, fracture, fragmentation, playful,manipulation,whimsical, process oriented,subversion, small scale,organic, presence, absence.

I am interviewing myself to generate an artist statement

Q:Give two words to describe my work

A:Subversive narrative

Q:I am a multi disciplinary artist, which mediums do I like to work in?

A:Fragile mediums.I want my works to have a life span, an expiry date  and would not like my works to last forever and ever.So I like working with paper or clay, felt and more recently cut paper, shadows, sounds.My starting point is always drawing and then I  give the drawing a shape or dimension.

Q: What is my process like?

A: I like labour intensive processes .I like the work to build up slowly with adventures and misadventures along the way.

Q:What are my themes?

A: I like to see the invisible and explore ephemeral, provisional, transient things like memory, loss, change, gravity, scent.....This arises from my itinerant existence relocating every few years, establishing new relationships, constantly dismantling and rebuilding my home, getting used to new people, cultures, languages and then moving again.

Q:What are my strategies?

A: I usually like to work small.I like my audience to interact with my works very closely and intimately.

I do not want to overwhelm them with larger then life images but want them to be larger then the works which gives them a sense of power .The experience I want to create is like peeping through a key hole.The other strategy is creating something very beautiful , very detailed, and layered. Everytime the work is viewed, a new aspect which is hidden, is revealed.I want to create something vaguely familiar ,dreamlike scenes blurry, ambiguous, strange, not really believable, part truth, part fiction, a sum of disjointed parts, part cheery, part disturbing.

Q:How important is research for my work?

A:I usually start my work with research and then spin off tales from there.I work on projects or series creating a body of work around a theme rooted in reality but gradually taking off into the realm of imagination.I research images from different sources and recycle them.

Q:Are you trying to say something?

A: I am trying to make my works more abstract to say a lot and yet say nothing so it is totally open ended.

First Draft of Artist Statement

Stories interest me infinitely and I am a visual storyteller.My works are an eclectic mix of fiction and reality wherein curious images take birth and read like a story. These stories  are open ended; they have no ending nor do they contain answers to the questions they pose.

My visual landscape is intricate, detailed, layered and complex, fashioned out of the resources of myths,& legends , Indian Miniature paintings, childrens' literature and contemporary culture as metaphorical correlatives to my experiences, bringing alive an alternate universe, where the real and the imagined coexist.

I  peel the layers and look  inside out.The fragments that make up my artworks weave and re-weave interpretations. The challenging of logic and the introduction of absurd allegories give an interesting edge to my work. What fascinates me is the contrast between what appears on the surface and what lies beneath. 

I work with delicate mediums like clay,felt paper,shadows, sounds, because  I like a certain fragility to be attached to my work .

I prefer labour intensive, process oriented methods of creating like printmaking, handcutting paper, handbuilding clay,making plastercasts of objects,weaving, knitting, cutting, stitching, glueing. I intend to create works like mazes, spider webs or venus fly traps which would draw the viewer very close and then trap them in.

The themes I like to investigate  are invisible ,sublime and ephemeral like memory, gravity, scent, change  or  time.