Deeply involved with the painful transience of displaced lives in our metropolises, Anjana Mehra’s work reflects the grief of unsettled living. Essentially drawn from the real-life experience after her transition from a peaceful town in Himachal Pradesh to Mumbai, her paintings lament rapid industrialization and the resultant depletion of nature and innocence.
The artist says, “It’s about the eventual alienation, which is caused by the unmanageable accelerated pace of life in today’s mechanized consumer cultures. The city (life) has always been my muse. I try to chronicle the changes in and around it.” For the artist, who has studied Painting (Fine Arts) at the Sir J.J. School of Art, Mumbai and Printmaking at the M.S. University, Baroda, art is a process and means of self-expression.
Her new series ‘PipeDreams’ at New Delhi based Gallery Espace comprises ten large canvases done in mixed media. The body of work lends voice to the unending trials and tribulations of people caught in the crossfire of socio-political, religious, as well as economic imbalances and unrest. The misery of innocent victims of violence uprooted by unsavory conflicts surfaces in her latest large format canvases.
Anjana Mehra has made use of black sand powder a popular building material, as it stands for the deceiving sheen and lure of the city. In the city, as it seems, one hardly experiences anything directly. Nature doesn’t even feature in our experience here, she notes. “The manmade environment we live in today is probably not the place we are designed (to live).”
The recurring motif of cylindrical pipes soaring into crimson skies depicts a ‘sense of alienation’. Black skeletal buildings amidst noxious washes of smoldering reds and melancholic blues are the leitmotifs of a city in flux. On the one hand, dense smoke emanating from mill chimneys smolder through them with tubular forms set against the backdrop of geometric grids of high rises, and on the other hand, there’s a poetic offering in the form of a bouquet of wild flowers growing out of the pipes and on pavements. It’s a haunting juxtaposition!
According to her, the works are about an infinite search placed within the corrosive nature of faceless, technology-driven societies.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment