Rana Begum at Jhaveri Contemporary
published in Art India, December 2019
--
Playing with Light
Through spray-painted sheets, folded foils, marble stones and a nylon fishing net sculpture, Rana Begum explores the interaction between space, form and colour, points out Anuj Daga.
One will be misled if one is merely taken over by the forms that are mounted neatly on gallery surfaces by the Bangladeshi-British artist Rana Begum at Jhaveri Contemporary, Mumbai, between the 19th of September and the 2nd of November. The large spray-painted sheets, folded coloured foils, terraneous jesmonite blocks, rounded marble stones and a fishing net displayed within the gallery are, in fact, quiet dialogues around colour and light. Rana Begum seems to be preoccupied with questions of interaction between shape, space and colour: how does light sculpt forms, what are the ways in which light can colour space, how do we wear the colour reflected off material surfaces, how do colours contour space? The methodical dismantling of colours that Rana employs in her construction of artworks, and its subsequent perception by the viewer opens a phenomenological field within which several such questions hallucinate much like her coloured spray-prints.
Palm-sized leaves of aluminium foil shimmer and mirror colour off their soft coat of paint into their warped micro-surfaces. They create a glow of tinted air within their contoured pockets. The linear grids, however, are the most mysterious lines on the foil surface. One wonders how these Cartesian lines get cast on the undulating surface of the foil? How could one possibly maintain the ordered nature of grids while still folding up the foil into a warped terrain? Rana collapses the smooth and the rough, the linear and the crooked, or even the opaque and the shiny onto each other. In doing so, she conceptually superimposes meridians of the flat cartographic map, the three-dimensional terrain and its subsequent interplay with light while producing a commentary on the experience of colour in space. As one continues to gaze through the works, the saturated hues within the work begin to solidify in the mind as the material of art.
The jesmonite cast works seem to be the solid counterparts of the thin folded foils, those that maintain their conversations with colour – now, bright and liberated. Each mounted contour is read in a distinct dominant colour, as if a de-layered GIS (Geographical Information System) map, isolated into its individual data terrain! When seen thus, the scaled landscapes begin to gesture about vegetation with theirseasonal colours of the fall and the spring. The polished marble pieces, all sets of different colours of the stone, reflect light crisply. They offer opportunities to consider the different colours in which light solidifies into stones. Each table of smoothened stones presents a family of sedimented saturations. Could these possibly have been excavated from one of the above representational sites?
In another section, a canopy of a fishing net spray-painted with rainbow colours splits each colour into thin threads. As one’s eyes traverse through the overlaps of these coloured threads in space, intermediate colours begin to appear. The blending of hues and their perception thereof allude to the dynamic patterns of spray-painted colour sheets. The space between the tautly held folds of the net diffract rays in feather-like delicacy. Further, the net casts shadows that index densities of these colorations on the ground. The dismantling of colour and its reconstitution in space is a characteristic experience of this gentle installation. Placed diametrically across a clear view of the Arabian sea within the gallery, the object begins to speak to the site, albeit in new ways.
Rana’s works clearly extract light and colour (essentially a function of light itself) as an experiential artefact. Primarily working through simple ideas and employing techniques like diffraction, diffusion, reflection and dispersion of light, one understands the pursuit of discovering a new experience in her experiments. Unlike the scientist, Rana works with an artful precision in order to create affective experiences that allow us to converse with light in a playful, childlike manner. It brings forth on canvas the psychedelic rendering of colours we often indulge in and perceive while wilfully closing our eyes. The sheer pleasure and mystery of such hallucinations find a lyrical documentation in Rana’s endeavour. Yet, her work is not divorced from form. Rather than reading sciography as a function of the object, Rana successfully inverts this relationship wherein crafting light defines her forms. This is the principal site of investigation that her works unpack for an artistic reconsideration.
--
Playing with Light
Through spray-painted sheets, folded foils, marble stones and a nylon fishing net sculpture, Rana Begum explores the interaction between space, form and colour, points out Anuj Daga.
One will be misled if one is merely taken over by the forms that are mounted neatly on gallery surfaces by the Bangladeshi-British artist Rana Begum at Jhaveri Contemporary, Mumbai, between the 19th of September and the 2nd of November. The large spray-painted sheets, folded coloured foils, terraneous jesmonite blocks, rounded marble stones and a fishing net displayed within the gallery are, in fact, quiet dialogues around colour and light. Rana Begum seems to be preoccupied with questions of interaction between shape, space and colour: how does light sculpt forms, what are the ways in which light can colour space, how do we wear the colour reflected off material surfaces, how do colours contour space? The methodical dismantling of colours that Rana employs in her construction of artworks, and its subsequent perception by the viewer opens a phenomenological field within which several such questions hallucinate much like her coloured spray-prints.
Palm-sized leaves of aluminium foil shimmer and mirror colour off their soft coat of paint into their warped micro-surfaces. They create a glow of tinted air within their contoured pockets. The linear grids, however, are the most mysterious lines on the foil surface. One wonders how these Cartesian lines get cast on the undulating surface of the foil? How could one possibly maintain the ordered nature of grids while still folding up the foil into a warped terrain? Rana collapses the smooth and the rough, the linear and the crooked, or even the opaque and the shiny onto each other. In doing so, she conceptually superimposes meridians of the flat cartographic map, the three-dimensional terrain and its subsequent interplay with light while producing a commentary on the experience of colour in space. As one continues to gaze through the works, the saturated hues within the work begin to solidify in the mind as the material of art.
The jesmonite cast works seem to be the solid counterparts of the thin folded foils, those that maintain their conversations with colour – now, bright and liberated. Each mounted contour is read in a distinct dominant colour, as if a de-layered GIS (Geographical Information System) map, isolated into its individual data terrain! When seen thus, the scaled landscapes begin to gesture about vegetation with theirseasonal colours of the fall and the spring. The polished marble pieces, all sets of different colours of the stone, reflect light crisply. They offer opportunities to consider the different colours in which light solidifies into stones. Each table of smoothened stones presents a family of sedimented saturations. Could these possibly have been excavated from one of the above representational sites?
In another section, a canopy of a fishing net spray-painted with rainbow colours splits each colour into thin threads. As one’s eyes traverse through the overlaps of these coloured threads in space, intermediate colours begin to appear. The blending of hues and their perception thereof allude to the dynamic patterns of spray-painted colour sheets. The space between the tautly held folds of the net diffract rays in feather-like delicacy. Further, the net casts shadows that index densities of these colorations on the ground. The dismantling of colour and its reconstitution in space is a characteristic experience of this gentle installation. Placed diametrically across a clear view of the Arabian sea within the gallery, the object begins to speak to the site, albeit in new ways.
Rana’s works clearly extract light and colour (essentially a function of light itself) as an experiential artefact. Primarily working through simple ideas and employing techniques like diffraction, diffusion, reflection and dispersion of light, one understands the pursuit of discovering a new experience in her experiments. Unlike the scientist, Rana works with an artful precision in order to create affective experiences that allow us to converse with light in a playful, childlike manner. It brings forth on canvas the psychedelic rendering of colours we often indulge in and perceive while wilfully closing our eyes. The sheer pleasure and mystery of such hallucinations find a lyrical documentation in Rana’s endeavour. Yet, her work is not divorced from form. Rather than reading sciography as a function of the object, Rana successfully inverts this relationship wherein crafting light defines her forms. This is the principal site of investigation that her works unpack for an artistic reconsideration.
No comments:
Post a Comment