The exhibition features artists who have explored and experimented with ordinary objects and finally juxtaposed these ordinary objects in unusual contexts, these ordinary objects have been used as the starting point of the artist’s journey to create his/her artwork and what we witness is the bestowing of new meanings to familiar things.
The ordinary inspires features two young Indian artists – Saptarishi Das and Gargee Ghosh.Saptarishi’s work address the everyday strife of middle class living using object that represent the ‘mundane.’ Saptasishi positions himself as the new collector and with his own private collections of seemingly unobtrusive treasures; He inspires from these collectives and from the physical space around him and also from his everyday area of work, the ‘virtual’. His work significantly takes a sculptural form as he layers it with these collectives: he forms collages which address in interesting ways the tensions between reality and representation. The series MyGrain convey food security for all, with agricultural prosperity. He tweaks the traditional form of art using food grains by encapsulating the grains permanently, and shaping it with contemporary image forms. The works in this series stand in a single word “ MyGrain” which is a hybrid word like hybrid crops, and refers as a whole to the problems and the demands for food or grain for every individual. He has purposely worked with poor quality images (pixilated or low resolution) of poor citizens of the society so that in a macro level the audience can find the proper images from a certain distance while in a micro level one can discover the original material: food grains.
Gargee Ghosh’s installation works bring into play, questions of authorship, of culture, and the endless journey of power struggle and feminist ideals. She inspires from feminine objects which also represent female bondage by social structures in our society. In this series of works Gargee uses broken glass bangles as a metaphor for women’s exploitation in the form of viruses; which breed maladies like rape, sexual harassment, dowry, child marriage, female infanticide, domestic violence and gender inequalities.
It is said that people often use art as a compensation for what they lack in their actual life, but these artists look at their art as ideally, things that lead back into life and thus enrich observation and awareness and as a show the ordinary inspires attempts to restore this perception.
Image: © Gargee Ghosh, Gallery Ragini
