ABOUT THE PROJECT
Can one ‘hold on’ to a territory amidst the onslaught of rapid, indeterminate and exhausting change? What is this sensation of being located at the edge, periphery or border of perpetual disturbance and what happens if we let go?
The artworks in this exhibition seek to explore the material and sensory thresholds of ‘holding on’: they grasp, retain and sustain amidst that which is fleeting, thawing and peeling. Collectively, they form topographies of longing and a desire to take hold.
CO CURATORS - AVANTIKA BAWA AND CELINA JEFFERY
GALLERY MASKARA, MUMBAI, INDIA
Dates - June 1- July 5th, 2011
Opening – June 1, 2011
Performance and Artist/Curator talk- June 4, 2011
Additional information and images of the exhibition can be found here: http://www.gallerymaskara.com/publication/10
THE ARTISTS/WORKS
MAREK RANIS
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Marek Ranis is a visual artist with an extensive record of shows, grants and residencies. Marek is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of Sculpture at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. KTM Sublime is his second Video Project after “Melancholia” made in 2007. For more info please visit marekranis.com
Hold On, 2010, video 3 min. 11 sec
ABOUT THE WORK - Hold on, video 3 min. 11 sec, 2010.
In my work, I look at large social and political events, ecology or geographical and political borders, from a larger cultural and historical perspective. Hold On shows footage from polar landscape and NASCAR car racing, the most popular motor sport in the US. The sound is an audio scan of radio exchange between driver and his crew. The exchange is about strategy of the race in the real time of racing. The sound in the background is a transformed recording of the race edited in to the loop. In Hold On, the extreme sport entertainment is combined with images of the sublime polar landscape of the ice fiord in Northern Greenland. This short movie was built on surreal juxtaposition of subjects and images connected by the notion of time, movement and ecology. The scale and sublime character of events witnessed in Greenland; beautiful, incomprehensible and terrifying, serve as a powerful metaphor for changes in our environment.
ABOUT THE WORK - Himasaila Project, site-specific installation, 2011
In the Himasaila Project, I am interested in connection between a global event such as climate change and its implications and understanding on the regional scale. Our perception of interconnectivity of events is in constant flux, which affects our ability to construct a clear, broad and comprehensive image. We tend to focus on large-scale, often catastrophic singular events and their immediate local impacts, but often struggle to grasp their broad and far reaching effects.
The form of Iceberg made of ice and cloth is amorphous, surreal and symbolic. The installation will play on the unusual juxtaposition of form and material to create a sense of paradox. The cold emanating from the structure and the sound of dripping water heightens a multi-sensory experience, emphasizing the ongoing process of change in time and the lack of stability. Over time, the mass of the installation will shrink dramatically, affecting its shape. Through this work, I am creating an overwhelming, almost sublime experience for the viewer and at the same time an aesthetically compelling piece, which inspires contemplation.
Jonathan Case is a TV and Film producer working in Charlotte, NC. He has won 6 Emmys and 18 Promax Awards for his work in television. His short films: "Ivory Bastards Against Extinction!" (2007) and "The Kill People" (2006) have been featured in numerous film festivals.
JOSHUA SMITH
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Josh Smith is a Portland, OR, USA based artist interested in the interstices of contemporary craft and modernist ideals. Along with being a practicing artist he is also co- director of Tilt Export, Portland, OR.
ABOUT THE WORK
My work for Hold On continues my investigation into modernist objects. These objects thus call into question material and formal hierarchies while maintaining a staunch dedication to the language of ‘making’. I exploit the structural quality of wood but often invert the conventions of material hierarchy to make work that visually challenges assumptions, and at times physics.
Utilizing a mixture of materials and processes, from complicated wood bending techniques to simple spray paint, I make forms that are conscious of their place and possess an obvious intentionality.In the work for Hold On, large architectural and formal devices (in this case, gallery pedestals) are stand-ins for the idealized rationale (of form following function) that was exported from Europe in mass during modernism's peak.
These ‘cold’ forms are contrasted with geodesic structures (waffle like risers that I will build), which act to disrupt and locate the pure logic of the larger forms. The geodesic forms reference both natural crystalline configurations (a fascination of early modernist philosophers) and the mathematical abstraction of more complicated organic forms through a system of geometry.
Furthermore, I am drawing attention to that which holds (i.e. the pedestal), by creating an elevation/uplift for it through meticulous hand made risers while also engaging with the architecture of the space (In mathematics, a geodesic is a generalization of the notion of a "straight line" to "curved spaces".)
MANSOOR ALI
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Mansoor Ali is a sculptor based in Vadodra, India.
ABOUT THE WORK
Beautifully Corrupt
The many scandals and issues that rocked the Indian nation during the mid 90’s to early 2004 inspire this work. These issues are still present today and have corrupted and amplified with the passing of time. It is interesting to note the differences in perspective of the common man/subject and the other political parties in opposition. In spite being the first part takers in the democratic nation, the people don't have a say and become mere onlookers while the filthy goons (politicians) make away with the prize. There are some listed and known reasons or excuses to be corrupt and this is a chain! One hardly ever escapes the encounter with corruption. My nation is "beautifully corrupt". The reason to oblige each one sitting/occupying the chairs in the system has a share and therefore any beneficiary coming down to the common man from the government or say the vice versa where the work to be done has to pass through these chairs for "evaluation" and "sanctioning" (what is normally called "the play under the desk/table" in common terms, leads to corruption increasing in the monetary terms. At times it leaves many broken and disheartened and leads to more poverty or suicidal cases.
Moreover this work is inspired by the way the termites live and work. Termites eat things up from the inside by building false walls. These shy and tiny creatures can't withstand the sun and do not live where they sense a lot of movement. They collaborate and work as an army, just like the bees do.
SATELLITE BUREAU
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Jen Hamilton, Jen Southern and Chris St Amand are artists based in Canada and the UK who use satellite navigation devices to trace the routes people take through local environments and to make collaborative maps.
The purpose of the bureau is to involve local people in making maps of an area, and to find new ways of representing the data gathered. Participants are invited to take a walk or a journey determined by themselves, whether it was the route to work, to an historic building, a walk for exercise or a meander based on more personal thoughts about location. The journeys are mapped with a gps (global positioning system) device. In these collaborative maps there is a powerful sense of people collaborating on a map of a place dependant on personal experience, rather than the measured assessment of a formal map. Our interest is in how walking with a GPS device that is transmitting live data gives walkers a new perspective on a journey, and how a sense of place is performed.
http://www.satellitebureau.net/satellitebureau/
ABOUT THE WORK
In keeping with the curatorial theme of thresholds, edges, our work looks more specifically at the locality of the gallery in relation to shipping yards of Maharashtra and the shipping industry as the vehicle for metaphor. The threshold that is investigated focuses on the ocean edge, further to this we imagine incorporating logged GPS shipping routes departing the region as a way to map lines made back and forth across the oceans, we are currently looking at the software used to extract this information as a starting point from which to also create a series of drawing/ prints.
STUART KEELER
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Stuart Keeler is an artist of public spaces who organizes exhibitions and multi-platform projects with the collaborative role of “curator” as the conceptual identity of his practice. Stuart has an MFA from The School at The Art Institute of Chicago, and is currently commissioned by the San Diego International Airport to create a suspended sculptural work is in collaboration with Swarovski Crystal New York, as well as Service Media, a two year book project will be published with Green Lantern Press-Chicago. In the fall of 2011, his curatorial project Leitmotif, will be featured at Nuit Blanche-Toronto.
http://www.stuartkeeler.com/
Vestige, Performance, 2011
ABOUT THE WORK
The lack of a dedicated green space in the city puts our mind in a place of want, longing and imagination. We think of the space outside the city, the expanse of green that we imagine beyond the last house, the last suburb and the last of the last. To make a connection back to the green expanse of the imagination, Keeler will create a costume that resembles a local plant to replicate the oasis of the mind. This camouflaged moving green scape will conspire to create a civic monument to activate the urban imagination.
The artist will be dressed from head to toe in fabric, and plastic simulacra of local flora (Kadamba, Teak, Karanj, Shisam, and species of Acacia, Ziziphus, Euphorbia). En costume, he will walk the city, and periodically stop to offer green space experiences to create a citizen participation with their local landscape.
The plant will also operate as a social catalyst as well as hopefully blend into various places to offer a camouflage oasis. The moving landscape will stop to offer shade to those who need it, as well as always allow others to imagine.
Avantika Bawa
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Avantika Bawa has an MFA in Painting from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (1998) and a BFA in the same from the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, India (1995). She was a participant at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Vermont Studio Center, and Genteel Artist Residency Program.
Note worthy exhibits include; solos at The Columbus Museum, Columbus GA; Saltworks gallery and the Atlanta Contemporary Arts Center, Atlanta, GA; Lalit Kala Academy and Nature Morte Gallery, New Delhi, India; Gallery Maskara, Mumbai, India; juried group shows at the Museum of Contemporary Art, GA, The Drawing Center and Smack Mellon, NY and SAVAC, Canada. Her works has been reviewed the New York Times, Art Papers, Art Lies, Art India, Art Asia Pacific, The Oregonian, and The Time of India amongst others.
Bawa’s curatorial work began with a hotel room show during the Art in Chicago fair (98’) and has grown through her studio and gallery, aquaspace – a laboratory for new and multi media art. In April 2004 she was part of a team that launched Drain - Journal for Contemporary Art and Culture. She is currently Assistant Professor of Fine Arts at Washington State University, Vancouver, WA.
CURATOR
Celina Jeffery
Celina Jeffery has a Ph.D. in Art History and Theory from the University of Essex (2002) and is Associate Professor of Art History and Theory at the University of Ottawa. Prior to this position she was a Professor of Art History and Senior Curator of Exhibitions at the Savannah College of Art and Design, USA. Jeffery co-edited Global and Local Art Histories with Gregory Minissale, Cambridge Scholars Press, 2007 and is a co-founder and editor of Drain Magazine: A Journal of Contemporary Art and Culture.
She has curated over 15 international exhibitions and written five exhibition catalogues. Three of her shows have dealt directly with nature: The Pulse of the Earth: Lorella Abenavoli (2007), used real time seismic data to create a sonic environment. The subtle movements of the Earth, whose frequencies are transformed to make them audible, permit us to sense the “pulse of the earth”. Cumulonimbus, Maja Godlewska, (2007) explored cumulonimbus as a phenomenon between the form and formless, and as a stage of simultaneous creation and deterioration through paintings, drawings and fabric installation. Afterglow, a multi venue exhibition in Lacoste, France, featuring Ghada Amer, Patrick Blanc, Maja Godlewska, Alfredo Jaar, Ju-Yeon Kim and Bill Viola was described as “the perfect summer show: well groomed and impeccably civilized with a thoughtful mix of the ecological, the poetic, the glamorous, the ideological and the engage.” (Lily Wei, Art in America, Nov. 2007).
