Digital photographs that become panoramic artworks

Born in Mysore in 1956, Baroda-based Vasudha Thozhur did her Diploma in Painting from the College of Arts and Crafts, Madras in 1979 after which she did her post Diploma in Painting at the Croydon School of Art and Design in the UK. Since then she has held over 15 solo exhibitions and has featured in numerous prestigious group shows.Here's a quick take on her recent body of works: 

• As a painter whose affinities lie with the fragility and power of the brush mark, the experiments and excavations that this body of work represents is, among other things, one more reflection of the continuing location and interrogation, within artistic practice, of media that answer different needs/occasions.
  
• The micro-narratives within it, in terms of stories as well as the sequence and history of evolving methodologies that tell these stories, are deceptive in that they are tinged with the tantalizing aura of the fragment, of transience and detachment, novelty and precedence. What is unique, however, is not the medium but the re-configuration that marks every deviation or inclusion, the path that one chooses in finding one’s way through new maps, and the continuing awareness of the distance and the closeness between oneself and an ever-receding horizon.
  
• The extensive use of cosmetic devices such as photoshop and aluminum composite board (which is used to clad the outer surfaces of buildings and is the true architect’s nightmare) assumes a special significance, one of equivalence with the artifice that is being investigated. One arrives at these choices through a process of research, creating thereby an ongoing commentary – there is an aesthetic investment, and also a discourse.
  
• Despite the problematics raised by these questions, the sheer force of the aspirations released actually creates works/performances, which are astonishing in scope and visually; and so are the party plots themselves! The digital photographs become panoramic artworks performing a very significant function in mediating the events that are staged, on a scale and with a conviction that is not often achieved in the ‘real’ world of art and the shaky video footage of fireworks and lights transform into nocturnal dreamscapes. Indeed the abstract, grim rendering of the works is deliberate, referencing the dark side of the subject itself.
  
• Thus playing on the rather obvious pun, the series is an attempt to unravel the ‘plot’, excavate answers and trace the paradoxes through the media best suited for the articulation – thereby discovering a route that would lead back to the heart of the creative process, regardless of the accompanying disquiet.