Studio Co-ordinator:- Shreyas Karle
Prutha Talekar
Exit Only, No Exit/No Entry, Entry Only
Artist Shreyas Karle puts up a show of 108 watercolour and ink drawings in his recent exhibition at Project88, Colaba. The set of drawings features pieces, corners, collections and different parts of his current house in Aldona, Goa. He talks about how his current Portuguese bungalow was not necessarily made to house a family from Borivali and hence he finds the need to constantly keep the furniture shifting and changing places. He says “that it allows the space to breathe” as opposed to restricting a wall completely by, say, keeping a sofa against it for ages. This constant need for shifting the interior space and the movement it offers creates a landscape within the already existing one. In his paintings, he tries to capture the conversation between the object and space.
As Shreyas talks about the show, he speaks of ‘passage’. Passage as a journey, passage as a space. Here the space is not only structural but also identifies as a matter of time. He further opens up this idea of space and relates it to the baggage that the space carries. Its history and archives. We tend to associate stories with structures as a space. For example, a gallery as a space with association with art only. Here one could question the idea of an exhibition. Do art galleries only exist in enclosed spaces? The artist drops these baggage, associations and identities, to work with the formation of space as a relationship with its objects.
One sees multiple entry points to the show. One of them being Janaa, Shreyas’ 9-year-old. The set of work on show holds a series of ink on paper drawings, ‘Half and Half’. These emerged as a collaborative work during playtime between Shreyas and Janaa, that later he turned to painting configurations of objects from their current CONA space and surroundings. This subtly opens up another entry point of ‘authorship in work’ and the dynamics of its replication by another artist. What becomes the original, then?
The show is staged in the form of a classroom.
White cube, large notice boards, drawings pinned up against the walls. This allows for the space to also become that of the multiple mentorships that happen over the course of the exhibition. The drawings are free from the boundaries of the frames. The passage becomes an escape. This challenges one’s ideas of what qualifies as an art. Can the artwork then also become the frame itself? Or can the frames become the artwork?
We see the two planes at play here. The plane of eye and the plane of mind. Shreya's talks about the conditioning of the eye with respect to the mind and says that the eye functions irrespective of the mind. There is a contingency and chance. Imagining by the creator, acting by the actor and juxtaposition by the witness of this constantly moving landscape of the house. How do the drawings of such shifting fragments then come together? What forms a whole, and what remains devoid of the other?
Comentários