Exploring the space between personal and cultural histories

Transparent Studio at Bose Pacia is hosting Daniel Ballesteros as the artist-in-residence. The artist will utilize the space as a nontraditional portrait studio, open to the public, while also setting up his mobile darkroom in various locations in the DUMBO area.

Ballesteros explores the space between personal and cultural histories and the influence it has over the present by interacting with residents and documenting the DUMBO landscape using a wet plate collodion process, a press release states.

It adds, “Through this alternative photography process, Ballesteros will produce portraits and images on glass plates in his portable darkroom lending a performative aspect to his method. The public is invited to attend a demonstration of the artist’s wet plate collodion process on 13th December.This project is sponsored, in part, by Lund Photographics, ArtCraft Chemicals and Bostick and Sullivan.”

Launched in January 2012, Transparent Studio is an artist residency program founded by Bose Pacia. Emerging and mid career artists are chosen for the studio program through a submissions process based on project proposal and artistic merit. Residents are provided with a studio in the main gallery space for a 1-3 month period. By turning the transitional gallery space into temporary artist studios on the street-level in an active arts neighborhood, we are hoping to allow for an atmosphere of engagement and conversation around the creative process. During the residency, the public is invited to interact with the artist throughout their creative process allowing exchange and collaborative relationships.

Born in Springfield, Illinois in 1980, Ballesteros received his MFA from the University of Connecticut and his BA from Webster University in Saint Louis, MO. His work has been exhibited in New York, Chicago, Santa Fe, Saint Louis, Las Vegas, and several academic institutions. He is the recipient of a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, and was selected to be part of Magenta Foundation’s Flash Forward 2012: Emerging Photographers as well as En Foco’s New Works in Photography awards. He lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

‘Half-life’ by Aditya Pande

A new series of works by talented emerging artist of India, Aditya Pande, at Chatterjee and Lal consists of a suite of mixed media on paper works and a video. In this major new series, entitled ‘Half-life’, he has teased out a multiplicity of meaning, re-wiring familiar imagery to be read as something quite other.

The works present variations on a constant substructure: the joining of the circle with the semi circle, the full with its half. At the same time the interpretation of the semi circle and circle can also be the command or function, DO.

The artist is fond of word puzzles and the idea of the encrypted repeats itself throughout the present exhibition. Decoding individual works is not possible in any linear sense; instead one may begin to sense a common grammar beginning to emerge within the context of the whole exhibition. This manifests itself, for example, in pictorial elements that will morph from one work into newly imagined forms in another.

The references from which he draws are hugely diverse and include the fields of science, mathematics, semiotics and the history of art and design. This is his second solo show in Mumbai. Aditya Pande was born in Lucknow, raised in Chandigarh, trained at the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad, and currently lives in New Delhi. His studio production oscillates between the fine and applied arts, two and three dimensions, the sensuously tactile and the aggressively optical.

On the computer, Pande weaves a tangled web of synthetic line work, looping through grand arabesques and squiggling together skeins to form animals and people, elaborates a detailed note on him by the Cherry Art Foundation.

It adds, “These forms are anchored by bold blocks of skewed colors, usually applied with glossy enamel paints that contrast against the more powdery finish of the ink-jet print, sometimes further articulated by the appearance of an unblinking eyeball or a shiny nose. On occasion collage elements are mixed in, for a pleasingly demented farce that is the collusion of painting, print-making, graphic design and draftsmanship.”

A quick glance at Škoda Prize nominees this year – II

The top 20 names for the Škoda Prize nominees' list have been chosen by the jury panel including the co‐founder of Devi Art Foundation, Anupam Poddar, and leading artist Sheela Gowda. The panel is chaired by Geeta Kapur, eminent art historian-critic.

Among the artists selected are Aditi Joshi (New Works at Gallery Maskara); Aditi Avinash Kulkarni (‘Alienation of the space...an ongoing experiment’ at Seven Art Limited); Adip Dutta (‘I have a face but a face of what I am not’ hosted by Experimenter); CAMP - Ashok Sukumaran & Shaina Anand -‘Two stages of invention’ courtesy Experimenter; L N Tallur (‘Quintessential’ at Dr Bhau Daji Lad Museum); and Mariam Suhail (‘Breakdown Of Shorter Concerns’ courtesy Galleryske).

The list also features names like Priyanka Choudhary (‘Tetanus Midas’ from Gallery Maskara); Praneet Soi (‘Notes On Astaticism’ Vadehra); Srinivasa Prasad (‘Nirantara’, Gallery Ske); T Venkanna (Open Studio: Printmaking; Gallery Maskara); Tushar Joag (‘Riding The Rocinante From Bombay to Shanghai’; Vadehra Art Gallery), and Zakkir Hussain (‘Zero Tolerance’ Vadehra Art Gallery).

Mention must also be made of artists Rohini Devasher’s and Vishal K Dar. The former’ works draw inspiration from biological specimen displays, astronomical observations, and magnetic resonance imaging but rather than creating static images, her works appear to breathe and grow. Her artistic practice has long been fascinated with the sciences and the natural world. The works in her chosen solo show might, at first glance, look more at home in a natural history museum or perhaps a biology archive.

They all play with organic boundaries and imaginary microcosms. This suite of videos, prints, drawings and a single sculpture works explore organic growth and evolution through a technological matrix. The forms she creates are familiar, albeit undeniably alien, encompassing the categories of animal, vegetable and mineral. She describes these life forms in a variety of media.

Vishal K Dar features in the Skoda Prize long list for an exhibition: NAAG, New Delhi. His projects often encompass digital, manual, material and monumental worlds; he looks to merge visual spectacle with socio-political concerns.

‘Metropolis of Mirage’, ‘Extra-Ordinary’, and ‘Listen to your Eye’

The Škoda Prize is now considered among the most prestigious and influential ones in contemporary Indian art. Its organizers have just announced the long list of select artists for the 3rd edition. The works reflect both diversity and depth of contemporary Indian art practices. They include innovative site specific installations, video installations, prints, drawings, photo collages, paintings, and performance art.

Jagannath Panda’s curious mix of the realistic and the mythological suggests the disoriented nature of today’s Indian identity, as it tries to straddle between the contemporary and the traditional, the imaginary and the actual, the indigenous and the international. In his works the surface of the sculpture or canvas is built up mostly with the addition of brocade fabrics, blended together so as to create the feathers of birds and skins of beasts, to mimic foliage or approximate man-made surfaces.

Such hybridized surface treatment corresponds with his themes that focus on moments, locations and icons in a state of flux, caught between oppositions. The artist’s portraits of the burgeoning Gurgaon city illustrate the tensions evident there owing to over-development that outpaces both infrastructure and natural habitats.

The artist explores the subtexts of the ordinariness of an ‘extra’ life that the metropolis offers its citizens. Unlike the overall decorative patterning of her earlier work (often used as a visual camouflage) within which the body/city conversed, fluid design appears at the edges of these paintings, framed within frames of overlapping narratives. Fixated at the centre in sombre dark hues of polluted grey and sleazy black, the decaying city emerges out of a bordered beauty. The actual and fictive, imagined and remembered city are evoked through personal and social worlds of the artist.

‘How do we see? What is the hidden agenda behind appearances? is what Sharmila Samant in her monographic series, entitled ‘Listen to your Eye’, looks to investigate. The artist retrospectively draws on her earlier projects continuing her critique of globalization, genetically modified foods and commentary on current socio-political undertakings.

Artists in the Škoda Prize nominees' list

The top 20 names for the Škoda Prize nominees' list have been chosen by the jury panel including the co‐founder of Devi Art Foundation, Anupam Poddar, and leading artist Sheela Gowda.
The panel is chaired by Geeta Kapur, eminent art historian-critic. Among the artists selected are Aditi Joshi (New Works at Gallery Maskara); Aditi Avinash Kulkarni (‘Alienation of the space...an ongoing experiment’ at Seven Art Limited); Adip Dutta (‘I have a face but a face of what I am not’ hosted by Experimenter); CAMP - Ashok Sukumaran & Shaina Anand -‘Two stages of invention’ courtesy Experimenter; L N Tallur (‘Quintessential’ at Dr Bhau Daji Lad Museum); and Mariam Suhail (‘Breakdown Of Shorter Concerns’ courtesy Galleryske).

The list also features names like Priyanka Choudhary (‘Tetanus Midas’ from Gallery Maskara); Praneet Soi (‘Notes On Astaticism’ Vadehra); Srinivasa Prasad (‘Nirantara’, Gallery Ske); T Venkanna (Open Studio: Printmaking; Gallery Maskara); Tushar Joag (‘Riding The Rocinante From Bombay to Shanghai’; Vadehra Art Gallery), and Zakkir Hussain (‘Zero Tolerance’ Vadehra Art Gallery).

Mention must also be made of artists Rohini Devasher’s and Vishal K Dar. The former’ works draw inspiration from biological specimen displays, astronomical observations, and magnetic resonance imaging but rather than creating static images, her works appear to breathe and grow. Her artistic practice has long been fascinated with the sciences and the natural world. The works in her chosen solo show might, at first glance, look more at home in a natural history museum or perhaps a biology archive.

They all play with organic boundaries and imaginary microcosms. This suite of videos, prints, drawings and a single sculpture works explore organic growth and evolution through a technological matrix. The forms she creates are familiar, albeit undeniably alien, encompassing the categories of animal, vegetable and mineral. She describes these life forms in a variety of media.

Vishal K Dar features in the Skoda Prize long list for an exhibition: NAAG, New Delhi. His projects often encompass digital, manual, material and monumental worlds; he looks to merge visual spectacle with socio-political concerns.

An artist who digs deep into mysteries of life

Primarily known for his sculpting skills, George Martin P.J. has painted several beautiful canvasses that dig deep into the solved and unsolved mysteries of life. His densely populated paintings resonate with the transitory and disunited true nature of our world. They enact the enigmatic drama of contemporary life. His luridly colored sculptures and canvases are dotted with scenes from dense urban spaces – ubiquitous yet unfamiliar to us, at times.

Working with a wide range of materials, he looks to build serene and vivacious visual harmony. The images or forms - quotidian in nature – construe each work that represents the complexities of urban life. The artist ably captures the outer layers of urban spaces, which reflect the postmodern sense of reality.

These postmodern architectural structures dispel the sense of unity from a closer distance though they show transparency and a feeling of progress, scientific achievement etc from a considerable distance. The enigma of the human drama begins where the sense of reality is displaced or destabilized from its own immediate surroundings.

New Delhi based Visual Arts Gallery, India Habitat Centre had presented a show, entitled ‘Surviving Sagas’ in 2010 courtesy Ashna. A gallery note on George Martin mentioned: “The artist approaches the world is capable of discriminating people as per religion, caste, creed, fashion, language and so on from a pointed perspective. However, his engagement with the outer world of reality does not happen through the portraiture of people as they are or as they caught in certain symbolic situations.

“On the contrary, he looks the world around him through a filter of unreality, which could split, and dismember the palpable reality into pieces where the represented ones become patterns and they demand viewers’ complete devotion for cohesive reading. He has always been interested in tracing the political, cultural and existential structures that are operational in our society, secretly and overtly exercising power on people. In his artistic world, which in all sense is a coagulation of several micro worlds, exists people, animals, architecture, vehicles and urban streets as phantoms that detach themselves from the reality.”

Works by George Martin evoke magical reality

George Martin's works portray the world around us, including his acrylic abstractions that exude energy. In his visual extravaganza, he merges multiple colors and cultures.

He has explained in an interview: “In the contemporary context of life, ‘moments of truths’ are fleeting. The sporadic linkages among random visuals create a virtual notion of reality. As an artist, I look to go beyond them for the linkages that would eventually connect the artistic representation with the memories of the fleeting visuals.”

A sculptor by training, the artist has always explored new mediums and artistic possibilities. His new body of work presented by New Delhi based Vadehra Art Gallery is a testimony to his keenness to experiment. Primarily known for his sculpting skills, he has painted several beautiful canvasses that dig deep into the mysteries of life. His densely populated paintings resonate with the transitory and disunited true nature of our world. They enact the enigmatic drama of contemporary life. His luridly colored sculptures and canvases are dotted with scenes from dense urban spaces.He ably captures the outer layers of urban spaces, which reflect the postmodern sense of reality.

These postmodern architectural structures dispel the sense of unity from a closer distance though they show transparency and a feeling of progress, scientific achievement etc from a considerable distance. The enigma of the human drama begins where the sense of reality is displaced or destabilized from its own immediate surroundings. His works throb with the same sensibility, both as acceptance and critique.

George Martin maneuvers the same images to stimulate new expressions and evoke a magical reality. The new works are titled with a sense of strong perceptivity as conveyed in ‘Crude sanctum’, ‘Urgency of the present/ the redemption of the past’, ‘Forgone conclusion’, or ‘Laugh & re-memorization’; all of which suggest a synthesis of ideas that have coagulated to raise each work.

They display an organic process of artistic development, which can be mapped thus, by following the drawings and installations. Entitled ‘Objective Voice’, his new series comprises drawings on paper and series of installations. Done in fiberglass, vinyl and aluminum, these comprise sculpture works, neon and light emitting diodes.