Between You and Me

I have been extremely busy in the last 3 weeks. I decided to make a series of drawings on rice paper.Stamp size drawings.I wanted to frame them in box frames and pin them up like specimens of butterflies/insects are pinned up for study by entomologists.I  thought of a number of roughly 20 drawings.When I started to draw I realized that framing these in glass boxes would be cumbersome to transport and the glass might shatter in transit. There was also a constraint of wall space to showcase these drawingsI decided to put  all of them in a hand stitched book instead.Once that was decided, there were no limitations of a certain number.I let the thoughts and ideas flow and caught them quickly onto the paper.

The drawings deal with moments.Moments that are slippery , uncomfortable and potentially dangerous.These moments can tip in any direction.There is no way to tell what might happen next. 

I completed more than 80 drawings and hand stitched them carefully and laboriously in a book.The rice paper was very filmsy and delicate.I called the book "Between You and Me". It is a book of secrets but the secrets told might be fabricated and not necessarily true.

Hybrids in Mythology

For as long as humans have been making up stories, we’ve been making up stories about creatures who are part-human, part-animal. A Greek demi god mates with a horse, and the result is a half man half horse. A grief-stricken Assyrian goddess flung herself into a lake and became half fish. A Poseidon admirer slights the sea god, who then makes his wife fall in love with a bull, conceiving a half man half bull. A woman in a French myth sleeps with a bear and their offspring is a Jean De l 'Ours. At the center of all these myths is the universal truth- beneath our intelligence and emotional capacity, we are ultimately animals. 

Hindu mythology is no different.The most prominent hybrid in Hindu iconography is elephant-headed Ganesha, god of wisdom, knowledge and new beginnings.Hanuman is a mighty warrior God part monkey part human. In India the festival Hanuman Jayanti is popular when colourful processions fill the streets. People dance, carry idols of Lord Hanuman and some people wear masks and tails to imitate the monkey God. Kali appeared when Parvati shed her dark skin which then became Kali, the Dark One whilst Parvati was left as Gauri (the Fair One). This story emphasises Kali’s blackness which is symbolic of eternal darkness and which has the potential to both destroy and create.

Both Naga and Garuda are non-hybrid mythical animals (snake and bird, respectively) in their early attestations, but become partly human hybrids in later iconography.

The hybrid Gods I grew up looking at are embedded in my subconscious mind and influence my drawings. 

Elephant God Ganesha

Snake Goddess Nagini

Garuda

Hanuman Monkey God

Kaali the black one

Dark Nursery Rhymes

I always thought nursery rhymes had dark secrets hidden in them and this research proves it.The beautiful apparently nonsensical rhymes we sing to children at bedtime are probably not so innocent after all.....


Plague, medieval taxes, religious persecution, prostitution: these are not exactly the topics that you expect to be immersed in as a new parent. But probably right at this moment, mothers of small children around the world are mindlessly singing along to seemingly innocuous nursery rhymes that, if you dig a little deeper, reveal shockingly sinister backstories. Babies falling from trees? Heads being chopped off in central London? Animals being cooked alive? Since when were these topics deemed appropriate to peddle to toddlers?
http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20150610-the-dark-side-of-nursery-rhymes?OCID=Scroll

http://mentalfloss.com/article/55035/dark-origins-11-classic-nursery-rhymes

A Matter of Scale

I was always intrigued by the question of scale and size in visual art.How big should a piece art be?Should it be monumental or miniscule? collossal or miniature?

Having identified that my works tended to be small scale,I had addressed this question to Sheikha Lateefa Maktoum, curator and founder of Tashkeel Gallery in Dubai many years ago." My works are small , do I need to be worried?Does an artwork necessarily have to be large to captivate an audience?"She had explained it to me in very simple words "Small is not inferior.It is a question of intention.If you want the viewer to be overpowered by the work , to look upto it in awe and wonder, it must be larger than life.On the other hand, if you want to evoke feelings of empowerment in the viewer, a sense of strength which comes while witnessing something small scale, the artwork must be small even miniscule. A strong statement need not always be big".I was very satisfied with this answer.

Brazilian artist Cildo Meireles's work Southern Cross made between 1969 and 1970, is only nine millimeters square in size.Yet this wooden cube created by Meireles by sanding down oak and pine tree to make a political comment , a caution against indifference, especially against indifference towards Brazil's fading indigenous population is a powerful piece of work.The cube  is  so apparently tiny that it impossible not to think initially of its size.This conceptual piece is meant to be placed in a large empty room . It literally lies at the viewer's feet and is barely visible. Yet, it is successful in commanding a presence , a position of authority ,in a seemingly vast space.

Cildo Meirles, "Sacred Cross", one section pine, one section oak 1969.

On the other hand monumental pieces of work like Andy Goldsworthy's land art invoke a feeling of eternity, the vastness of nature and the cosmos.

Andy Goldsworthy, S"now drift", carved into snow, Grise fiord, Ellesmere Island, 1989

The human body has been the point of reference for all measure of size and scale.Objects can be scaled according to the proportions of an adult viewer.Or scaled as per a child  or even that may not be human at all.It is a question of possession or being possesed.

Size, broadly defined as the relationship between the actual physical magnitude of a thing and how that magnitude is represented, depends on how size enables a material and physical entity to function convincingly as an artwork.

Scale therefore opens up an almost algorithmic process of recognizing not only how things and people occupy a given space in relation to one another also how artworks mediate the relations between things and people.


REFERENCE:

http://www.academia.edu/12048944/Scale_to_Size_An_Introduction

scale (proportions) has been emphasized on more than one occasion, the productionof scale often depends on various articulations of size which themselves are farfrom stable.

4

As Anne Wagner observes, enlarging or reducing the dimensions ofan object can take place according to the most rigorously observed standards, ‘yetthe

effects

 of these alterations are not necessarily either stable or predictable’.

5

Furthercomplicating the discussion is the distinction between absolute dimensions, or whatmight be called explicit size, and implicit size, or what the arrangement of parts in agiven artwork suggests to a viewer about its proportions.

The Placement Issue

It is decision making time. There are several possible ways to exhibit my paper cutouts which  one should I choose? I discussed these with  visiting tutor Jaimini. She asked me to question the conceptual issues. What am I trying to do here?

Jaimini gave me the following advice-: I should continue playing with the cutouts and figure out how to place them before reaching Barnsley for the exhibition.To think whether I must select an edited version and place them on a long shelf or choose a large number and place them together in a group on a table or a plinth,.

She told me to consider the following things-:

1. can each  piece be scrutinized individually in a crowd if placed in a  large group? 

2. if they are placed next to each other how will I decide which piece will be placed next to which.Will altering positions change the narrative? 

3. Do I want the viewers to look at the pieces at eye level or from above like a bird's eye view? 

4. can the pieces be looked at from the back how would it look if the back is visible? 

5.what is my objective?is it to create a spectacle or to make an impact beyond a certain wow factor?

I want to paste the cutouts on thin white foam board to maintain their delicacy and get small wooden bases constructed by a carpenter to make them stand up. Jaimini suggested that I also try constructing bases with foam board to maintain continuity and also try a few wooden bases , place the works on a shelf and see what is happening, place them on a table and see the result and then decide how I want to finally present the work.

My various options for exhibiting the work-

1.exhibiting the  in clusters in various parts of the gallery space.I would put them in various unexpected places and surprise the viewer. It is a plain white gallery not one with nooks and crannies.The chances of that are dim.

2.They could be placed on the floor or on a large plinth but in a large crowd or group.If they are on the floor, the viewers would habe to sit down and look at them.This would be spectacular but the details might not be clearly visible , I will have to try it out and see .All the cutouts together would give the impression of a dark party or a circus.I am very interested in this throng idea.

3. suspending the cutouts from the ceiling but again the backs would be seen and the details will not be clearly visible.

4. I could pin them on the wall but these are 3D Works and pinning them on the wall would turn them into 2D works which is not my intention.I want them to come out and play.

5.I can create shadows using screens which is a great idea for another time but not here since only the silhouettes will be seen.

6.I could place them along a shelf in a row so each one is clearly visible and yet is alive and breathing.I have seen an installation at Art Dubai 77 Benevolent Elephants by Dina Danish which I thought was non fussy, at eye level and each work was standing out on its own.The negative of this is that it is too clinical.I want to make something "mad" and this is probably too sane.

77 Benevolent Elephants   Dina Danish

A light on the Moon Geoffry Farmer

experiment with shadows

A throng-this is my first choice depending on the availability of space

Arranging the cutout on the wall will take away their 3 D ness

Arranging cutouts in a row but overlapping them

Hieronymus Bosch

Hieronymus Bosch

http://boschexpo.hetnoordbrabantsmuseum.nl/en/jheronimus-bosch

Nalini Malani

During the past twenty years Malani has produced a defining series of multisensorial experiences that incorporate a signature theatrical aesthetic alongside a macabre subtext and a cast of mythical characters as a way of responding to negotiating with and partially memoralizing these shocking sociopolitical events.Her installation " Unity in Diversity" perfectly encapsulates so much of what Malani's practice and approach involve:sinister, fantastical imagery, theatrical staging, philosophical notions, references to violent, controversial, contemporary moments and most significantly poignantly emblematic female protagonists.Through 1970s and 1980s, Malani's ethereal ,emblematic paintings and drawings exemplified her investigations into philosophy and literature and mythology.Well known Hindu mythological characters and quirky Western literary figures from Sita in the Ramayana and Radha in the Mahabharata to Alice in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland would continue to provide an extensive lexicon for Malini to cross reference to combine recreate and use as points of departure while investigating contemporary issues Living in Alicetime 2005-2006 and Splitting the Other 2007.Although she does not classify herself as a feminist ,Malani continues to address ingrained gender inequality conceptualizing fictional narratives around women while sometimes degendering her subjects and abstracting the notions of masculinity and femininity.India's society remains predominantly under a patriarchal system.Malani takes contemporary versions of myths in literature and finds innovative ways to adapt appropriate and reassemble them, building a bridge between the audience and the story.For Documenta 13 Malani created 5 rotating cylinders each with painted figures on them drawn from Malani's lexicon of surreal , peculiar lexicons of surreal peculiar specimens- eight armed goddesses ,autopsy instruments,creatures with protruding vertebrea figures in fetal positions some painted in part and some with greater detail all projected shadows that overlapped with one another.The impact of communal violence in India the rising frustrations of the poor and the imbalance of gender are clear yet measures are not taken to solve these situations.Whether addressing the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947 the Babri Masjid riots in 1992 or the Gujarat genocide in 2002,Malani asks the same questions- who is the hero?who was the victim?where was the history written ?why has it not been recorded?where has the blood gone?

Dhar, Jyoti. In the heart of darkness: Nalini Malani [online]. ArtAsiaPacific, No. 84, Jul/Aug 2013: [54]-63. Availability:<http://search.informit.com.au/documentSummary;dn=738466046855052;res=IELAPA> ISSN: 1039-3625. [cited 14 Apr 16].

Personal Author: Dhar, Jyoti; Source: ArtAsiaPacific, No. 84, Jul/Aug 2013: [54]-63 Document Type: Journal Article ISSN: 1039-3625 Subject: Malani, Nalini, 1946-; Women artists--Psychology; Artists--Professional ethics; Painting--Philosophy; 

Rokni Haerizadeh-Fictionville

http://ci13.cmoa.org/artists/rokni-haerizadeh

Fictionville

Over the years, the work in the series "Fictionville" by Rokni Haerizadeh has taken on multiple shapes and forms ,from  idiosyncratic paintings to drawings to animations and now to collage. He breathes life into forms and then kills, rendering his canvas or paper a dynamic place in which the workings of memory and the subconscious battle.This body of work seems intent on unsettling the viewer, its intertwining of the familiar and the bizarre seems calculated to provoke amusement as much as outrage. Layers of paint and ink subvert and transform the printed image, turning human figures into human-animal hybrids.The background of each image is a news photograph or a still of news footage which is then prepared painted with large washes of colour and drawn over with fine pen and ink that give the image its new contours.

The interventions are subtle.A snout like nose exaggerated here, a hoof peeking out out there, heads with hints of donkey ears or horns.Other times the picture underneath has been completely painted over.Armies of cats stand off against mice, rows of beasts perform military saluted and checkerboard floors decorate public arenas.

Violence is the common link.The works target the falseness and hypocrisy of acts committed in the name of institutions that govern the private and social sphere, such as the social models put forward by the state, the church(mosque), the school or the family.If the images are uncanny,it is because we recognize familiar prejudices in strange bodies.Performed by demons and beasts, human actions take on a surprising expressiveness.

Its insistent experimentation with what Haerizadeh describes as "personal mythologies" are nonetheless grounded in concrete social and political archetypes. The use of animal imagery has a respectable political pedigree. In its approach it seems like George Orwell's Animal Farm, a parable of human malice and collective failure .

The cumulative effect is to distance the viewer from the scene's immediate motivations or geopolitical coordinates, often the only indication of actual location is a fragment of a caption, the language of markings on police shields, or the telltale signage of store fronts.Violence speaks the same language these images suggest, whether in Tehran or London or Moscow whether spoken by the victim or the perpetrator.The moral dilemma is how to negotiate our numbed response to the rise and fall of news cycles and their sound byte politics rather than how we may judge the victims or victors.

Haerizadeh describes his approach as doodling; a deskilled intuitive process, that claims no mastery of what might emerge and is defined by its distracted and mediated nature.

Here is a dialogue about a truth, that may lie beyond facts.

http://ci13.cmoa.org/artists/rokni-haerizadeh

Gregory Crewdson-Beneath the Roses

"For me the first and foremost intention is to make a beautiful picture.But if it is that and nothing else it is not good enough.There has to be an undercurrent of something psychoanalytical made evident,dangerous, uncanny, desirous or fearful."  If you can freeze a moment of your dreams and look at it in detail that is what Gregory's pictures look like. People aimlessly or listessly walking back and forth, there is a sense of imminent danger.The images are quiet in tone but operatic, grandiose and elaborate in scale using the mechanics of cinema,meticulously thought through .The characters in Gregory Crewdson's series Beneath the Roses seem to be surrounded by an aura of loneliness.The worlds they inhabit appear to be populated with the ghosts of sinister deeds and regrets.The locations in his pictures always convey a sense of separation transmitting a wish to be at home in the world but feeling slightly alienated instead. Crewdson uses light as a way to tell a story and as a means of emphasizing dramatic qualities and the feeling that something lurks underneath the surface.In the beautiful but disturbing images in the precisely choreographed and elaborately staged "Beneath the Roses" series, Crewdson explores the American psyche and the dramas at play within quotidian environments.he images deal with the American dream and its dark sides and refer to the myths of Hollywood movies.Son of a psychoanalyst, Crewdson succeeds in stimulating the viewer's subconscious on various levels, playing with metaphors for fears and desires.Ordinar people inhabit the theatrical yet intensely real panaromic images, referring to the picturesque tradition of a small human figure in a larger landscape.

All the artists who inspired Crewdson namely  Edward Hopper, Kim Novak, Joel Sternfeld Lee Friedlander deal with ideas of beauty, sadness, alienation and desire. Furthermore they share a fundamental interest in the intersection between theatricality and everyday life. Many of the images might be described by the word disquieting , a suggestive word that contains the word quiet.Several of the pictures appear quiet and tranquil on the surface but beneath that surface there is a troubling psychology in operation.There are strong and fascinating polarities at play in these images.Many of them induce a feeling of loneliness or alienation which sometimes merges with an underlying sense of hope and possibility.

The paintings of Edvard Hopper are at the centre of this tradition.Hopper's works are deeply evocative and often tell a narrative story in a single picture .They depict impregnated moments the images seem to pose a question and that question remains unresolved.His stil vignettes seem eternally suspended in an instant between "before" and "after".Hopper's "Western Motel" presents a lone woman in an anonymous hotel room perched on the edge of a bed.Her vacant gaze hints at some apprehension or an anticipation of something.The armchair that enters the frame from the lower right and the two standing suitcases on the lower left suggest another presence,implicating the viewer in the narrative.While Hopper's images evoke a sense of loneliness and disconnection,there is always a feeling of possibility or transcendence established again through the use of light.Hopper could be described as a "psychological realist".On the surface almost nothing is happening in his images yet they are fraught with a quiet sense of mystery, wonder and alienation expectation.

Western Motel, Edvard Hopper, 1957

http://www.nga.gov/exhibitions/2007/hopper/assets/screening.shtm


https://vimeo.com/120697871

Beneath the Roses, Grego Crewdson, 2003-2008



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S7CvoTtus34

Anna Gaskell-The Fiction of Fictions

When Alice tumbled down the rabbit hole, she found herself in a land of non -sequiturs where reason is inverted and the unexpected , the rule.Always a pragmatic little girl , she could not fathom the bizarre events unfolding before her, particularly the shifting of scale of her own body.From one moment to the next she shrank to a fraction of her size and then grew to gigantic proportions.While confused and frustrated at the blatant illogic of her new environment,Alice never doubted its reality.It is through her self possession,her refusal to consider the possibility that this world is a product of her imagination that Wonderland can come alive for the reader.

Gaskell imbues her photographic narrative a mediation on Lewis Carroll's celebrated story with an ominous air. The sense of something ominous lurking at the surface however lush and jewel like the surface may be informs the series as a whole.But that is to be expected from fairy tales with their often perverse Brother's Grimm sensibility.The real twist in Gaskell's retelling of Alice in Wonderland a tale so well known that it forms part of our collective unconscious -lies in the replication of its heroine .Alice's double identity  adds a complex layer to the fiction .Are these two girls actually a pair of twins or rather the physical manifestation of a split personality?If the character of Alice imagines her own alter ego into tangible form, if she conjures up her doppelganger, how can the rest of the story be believed?The artist manipulates her narrative by embedding a fiction within the main fiction which throws into question the veracity of the tale.For each body of work, she stages evocative dramatic moments of a larger plot while simultaneously disrupting the transparency of their narrative.

Gaskell's fictions usually involve some form of deception they depend upon exaggerations lies, even crimes for their internal structure.Her stories circulate around processes of make believe from the innocence of childish games to the anguish of mental illness. Built from layers of untruth, they bring into focus the tenuous distinction between empirical reality and the imaginary. 


Gaskell's fictions are based on fictions.Her literary sources are often discernable but the work does not illustrate or interpret these narratives.Rather they invoke a tone or sensation specific to each source that can best be described in oxymoronic terms as "exquisite unease".In creating this effect over and over again,Gaskell's images evoke discursive strategies unique to a literary genre known as fantastic.Outlined by Tzvetan Torodev, this type of literature puts the reader into a state of ambivalence of not knowing whether the seemingly real characters portrayed are experiencing events caused by natural or supernatural forces.In these instances known boundaries between matter and mind dissolve leaving the body and its psyche susceptible to many transformative processes including multiplication of selves , the protraction or contraction of time, the distortion of space and the fusion of subject and object. Such phenomenon is common to the realms of madness,dreams and drug infused state of dementia.They are also synonymous with how infants perceive the world until they are able to differentiate themselves fro their surroundings.Its intonations of apprehension are present like fever invisible but unsettling and potentially destructive.As the corporeal manifestations of subconscious elements, personality traits and pathologies, these figures patently misbehave.In many of her more poignant and disturbing images they act out an individual 's most destructive impulses.

Anna Gaskell "Untitled 2" from "Wonder series
mouth to mouth resuscitation or suffocation ?        

Paula Rego-Telling Tales

Paula Rego's work embodies a narrative impulse and underline the self subversive aspects of storytelling.It evokes pastness as a trace an indexical physical vestige .It probes Protugese iconography probing the visual culture that informs her childhood.It brings into focus something that is hidden but not entirely forgotten. Rego invokes not only the convulated routes of historigraphy but also the circuitous chronologies in a scene of psychoanalysis.In their unfolding the narratives bring into the analytic arena animate an anteriority immersed in immediacy where current action stands in place of a muffled memory.If for Freud the uncanny the unheimlich is the name for everything that is unremembered but not forgotten that ought to have remained a secret and hidden but has instead come to light ,then unnervingly its opposite, the heimlich or homely is the condition in which all that is secret and hidden must persist so.The homely is the breeding place of secrets.And with secrets come allainces, collusions.Concealment and disclosure sanction and reward coercion and betrayal these are plotted in the home, in the private realm of domesticity, and their intertwinement and articulation map the subject's relation to its primary caretakers and via them more abstractly to love and authority.Rego's figures also perform a political drama .Here we see the staging of the relationship of subordinates to superiors , a relationship that, in Rego's work, paradoxically both endorses and reverses traditional gender roles.Conversely the political finds its most apposite setting in the intimate relationship between two or three people.Many of Rego's works are staged in a domestic interior and poses questions such as-"what is it like to be submissive or subversive, obidient or rebellious as a citizen as a mother or daughter or a wife or a lover".Rego satirises and avenges in her political works in the tableaux of domestic revenge.

In the work "Girl Shaving a Dog"  Rego explored the possibilities of aggression underpinning acts of nuturing.Disgust and anger lurk behind her manifest disposition of patience and compassion. The dog extending his neck to the shaving blade is exposed and vulnerable, at the mercy of his carer's clemency.For her part she is a scarcely disguised bearer of aggression  transforming the acts of nursing, feeding and shaving into preludes to murder.

The objective of psychoanalysis to to bring what is unconscious into conciousness and the objective is to delve into the unconscious of Rego's work not only her personal unconscious but the historical and ideological forces that work behind the scenes.

Many of Rego's images are drawn from a common cultural reservoir .The importance of existing narratives stories, opera plots, poems, fairy tales , novels -standing in relation to pretext of her works reveals the extent to which her paintings, drawings, and graphic work relate to a textual order.Intertextuality differs from iconography in disallowing source to stand as origin, emphasizing the extent to which verbal or visual texts are cross fertilized by other textual material both at the point of production and reception.To view an image intertextually is to deconstruct antecedence itself.It is to disallow the present from enshrining the past as complete, ready-made and already given. In interviews Rego has always insisted that she looks for inspiration to popular sources to the marginal and the outcast and never to the canonical to the Old Masters .

For Paula Rego a pictorial narrative is ratified by its rendering of specific settings from childhood and the country of her birth has remained insistently present in all her work.She proclaims an allegiance with a narrative told from the sidelines with historians of everyday life.In a world of unmastered fluidity girls, vegetables, animals cavort with malicious pleasure  intermingle and are mutually transformed into polymorphous hybrids.In a way these works spill directly from an uncensored imagination an extraordinary idiosyncratic vision.Her works break down boundaries between inside and the outside of the personal body announcing instability of the social body at large.It smudges distinctions a leak between boundaries and heralds a collapse of hierarchy and meaning.

Paula Rego "Girl Shavin a Dog", 1986


Reference-
LOVE AND AUTHORITY IN THE WORK OF PAULA REGO, Narrating the family romance-Ruth Rosengarten