‘Urban Space, Counter Gaze’ by Shruti Gupta Chandra

Urban spaces, their unavoidable role as an aspirational desire, the angst they generate and also the fact that they are slowly but surely eating into pristine rural spaces is what forms the crux of artist Shruti Gupta Chandra’s new series on display at Gallery Artspeaks, New Delhi.

A case in point is her ‘I Hope To Find’, a large-sized acrylic on canvas, which acknowledges this intrusion through symbolism of staircases, to point out how it’s dramatically altering the rural landscape, and irreversibly affecting their environmental balance and even rewriting their social history.

In another work, titled ‘Castles in the Air’, there are four panels of 40” each, which comprise the flight of stairs, seemingly taking the climber into an ideally transformed urban space wherein all can enjoy equal rights and justice. Curator Johny M.L Says: “This flight of spiral stairs surfaces in four different frames, which constitute one single work. The images of stairs in each frame denote different possibilities of movement. It’s almost like watching the same scene, albeit from different distances. Shruti Gupta plays up a virtual zooming purely for aesthetic reasons. Here, the twist is rendered when the artist opts to abstract the flights into a stream of some paper like filings in one of the frames.”

Giving a broader perspective to her series, the curator concludes that the artist interestingly choose to evade the idea of ‘femininity’. Though not a feminist in strict sense of the term, she passes counter gazes through a clever aesthetic ploy at a male-dominated society through male nude bodies. Though she portrays suggestive androgynous bodies in her works occasionally blurring the societal divides, she infuses them with a sort of strong musculature.

This counter gaze apparently comes from her formal training as an artist. Yet, this gaze suggests the artist’s contained albeit carefully cultivated gender politics. Her works while aesthetically negotiating the urban spaces, also counter the dominant male ideology on a level playing field of pure aesthetic expressions.