Monday, April 1, 2013

Rakhi Peswani’s art practice

A talented contemporary artist from India, Rakhi Peswani titles her works with equal sensitivity with which she models her works. Her occupation with the former (i.e. naming the work) stems out of a semi-permanent process of conceiving a word or any linguistic unit by visualizing its nearest form through an image, and executing the same with absolute equilibrated prowess.

It seems that her system of logic follows; that visual representations can be instrumental in clarifying complex arguments, and thus visual plays an important role in cognition. She understands it well and uses the tools to her benefit by creating a seamless blend of word and image. To all cerebral individuals, ‘words’ tend to play an important role in expressing nonobjective units or ideas. The artist has noticed that important locus between conveying and inferring through her stitched narratives.

Rakhi Peswani’s practice is a conflation of characters from both, the pliancy of paints and the procedural strength of modeling. She has been working with evidently a club of flexible mediums like cloth (various kinds), needle and thread, armatures, wooden frames/shelf and so on. Her selection of materials involve a conscious effort in understanding the same, their origins, their relation to a particular culture/s and therefore the utilitarian purpose of their being within a certain context.

Her engagement with materials roots deep down to her social, cultural and intellectual being, therefore it is not just the image of the work that speaks on her behalf, but it is also the material which completes the chronicle. Her point of departure is to locate a visual / verbal / tangible language that blends the local character of our system and the global character of verbal language.

The possible dual responsibility of a language allows her to articulate some of the present identities of an artist working within contemporary realities. She further layers this juxtaposition with the inclusion of verbal text, fabricating discreet ironies within the material processes to depict contemporary identities.

The artist is as much figurative as rational in her approach towards image conjecture. Her works are paronomasia in themselves, because they are often images of words or phrases like ‘Reflection’ or ‘Every stitch is also a trick’ either modeled, stitched or installed.

(Information courtesy: The Guild)

No comments:

Post a Comment