Second Year Exhibition

After a lot of struggling, grumbling, cribbing, pushing, thinking, working, the exhibition of the second year students was finally realized. We had as the jury : Kamu Iyer, Ravi Hazra and another person from Goa (whose name I forget).

Since the project was about the1:1 installations, there were no hard core drawings that any of the groups made. Earlier the students were asked to prepare sheets on corel draw. None of the groups had an idea to work on it, although they have been taught how to use it. But when the canvas becomes 8'x8' on a computer screen of 21", things have to definitely go haywire. I rejected the idea of computer drawings primarily because it was second year - where one needs to engage more with the hand done work. All we therefore had was the process rough drawings that were used to deliberate upon their constructions. These, i call second year "working drawings". It was a mammoth task to make the students understand that process drawings are not bad - that they are pinnable, that they are as beautiful as the final ones... For the entire beginning setup of the exhibition, students argued if they were to put such sheets. They never had the concept of having such drawings as final. They used to reproduce their process sketches on the final sheets. It told them that it was ridiculous to do so.

I felt there was a rich sense of beauty in the process work. My task was to bring in content on to the boards - mostly students get stuck in presentation drawings and making things look beautiful, and do things which tell nothing about their projects. I asked all students to bring in the lousiest of sketches that they had made over 2 months. They got them and then followed a process of selecting what we could possibly use. Cutting torn tracings neatly, straightening crumpled papers, neatly cutting all rough tracings into one size and then organizing them together - I felt as if i was making a beautiful collage of memories.

I wondered how students did not value such brilliant process drawings they made. Perhaps thats because they never refer to books. They are from the internet age. They are facebook people - people who see silly videos and "like" them. Partly, i think also their teachers never told them to concentrate making hard core process drawings, intense, and preserving work produced by spending long hours on board...

I had a tricky situation with two groups who didnot have almost any work! The painting group and the Parasite group. In all, the painting group had 12 'blue' pencil colour sketches of the same place, that too of different sizes. I asked them to make A3 photocopies of all of them to regularize the colour since it did not relate to their actual work at all. Then the remaining space was filled up by 8 A4 pictures. I dont know again, why students dont even understand the relationship between the sizes of papers i.e. A3=2(A4) = 2(A5). No one told us... One can use these proportions to think of organizing things on board...

Anyway, may be they were brain dead. So i just instructed and they executed. That was all I cared atleast for yesterday.

The second group had only 9 small sketches, almost of the size 15 x 15 cm - and other sizes. I asked them to regularize it to a format and then they had to put it in a grid. When I left things to them, they started making patterns from those squares - it was ridiculous! I just asked them to follow me and execute.The entire panel was blank otherwise. They creatively filled up with a stick model of their inspiration picture.

Another group which didnot really have any final drawings of the project was the tree - so we made a large tree cutout and pasted on the board. They executed it quite well and we made a put other process sheets to complete a frame.

Constant nagging, following up, trials and tribulations made the exhibition work somehow. As soon as Atul and i left, perhaps the entire class slept over. I say this because we had instructed them to finish things and they were still the same the next morning when we arrived.

Students were all well dressed - but the exhibition space was in a mess. This was beyond my control. I shouted at many of them, yelled to get them to action again - clean up drive - barrage of peons, house keeping guys and students followed. We removed horde of bags, organized cloth, cleaned of dust, removed garbage - all which should have done much earlier.

What was disappointing was that the AD faculty itself arrived at 9 am - completely unbothered about the whole setup. They also left the place by 10 30 am! They decided not to be there for their jury! This happened the second time. And I have never experienced this in my entire life time. I felt this was extremely irresponsible, despicable and unexpected behaviour.

Atul beautifully briefed about the project to the jury - sometimes i feel he really crisp in what he says. I felt i must have recorded. He assisted the students and the jury throughout. Students were half dead, which I dont know how to comprehend. It reminded me of times when I used to be awake for two nights working on my drawings (I was obsessed with inking) and still come fresh and remain fresh for my and my friends' juries. I listened to all of them - I don't know what would keep me awake. May be again, its just me.

In the end I would like to say that, if this process of putting up the final work was completely under my control, I would have strived to make this exhibition even better. There are many inconsistencies which I would have liked to work upon. But I was handed over the charge only for 8 hours - that too a day before. And I think I did a good job out of it. But it would require much thoughtful students, much trustworthy peers and much more control and authority to do an extraordinarily amazing exhibition...