10 - 12 February, 2014
Gallery Veda, Chennai
Participating Artist
Parvathi Nayar
Introduction
Column/Core is a diptych in which each vertical wooden panel holds hand-drawn images related to the human spine. The body has always been a part of Parvathi Nayar’s work; she uses the body to talk about issues including and beyond sexuality and analogizes it to the environment in which it exists. Over the years, Nayar has developed a language and an aesthetic for her seemingly abstract works that uses visual interventions mediated by exploratory devices such as the telescope or microscope - images like the magnified renderings of human cells, for example - which are drawn meticulously in graphite on wooden panels of varying two- and three-dimensional sizes.
In this drawing, Nayar has used dark shades of black graphite and the rendering of the image is balanced against the white space, which creates a parallel world of forests and nature in the viewer’s mind. Nayar plays with the full range of technical possibilities of the medium she uses; most of her drawings are rendered to create a range of intricate textures that reconfigure the surface, and endow tactility to the work.
The Ambiguity of Landscapes showcases how Nayar engages viewers - and locates her work within Indian contemporary art - through a kind of detailed minimalism by breaking spatial hierarchies of portrait, still life and landscape, using highly magnified fragments from human tissues, satellite data, and imagery from particle colliders among others. The origins of Nayar’s art can be located in a transitional generation of artists that has grappled with several key concepts such as tradition, ritual, city, change, architecture, science and technology - in art as well as in the making of politics and identity; most Indian artists of this generation have expressed their ideas through traditional, modernist and post-modern media. Nayar’s core practice of hand-drawn graphite and painting is inflected by this intermediate generation, and her art also has expanded now to other media such as photography, video, bookmaking and animation (1).
The visual culture of science and technology, images produced under the microscope or from a satellite may inspire her, in a small part, to critique its celebration of empiricism - but more it is used as a means of questioning the phenomenology of our place in the world. She complicates the visual qua visual in her art and explores the forms and textures revealed to us by the scientific advancements of our times.
Science and Abstract Minimalism
To Know the Depths or Heights is a diptych in which each vertical wooden panel bears hand-drawn images derived from the skeletal system of bones in the human body. Both panels have texts bookending the imagery at their edges. The text in this work explores the slippages between word and meaning and the semiotics of what is being referred to as an amalgamation of fragments derived from the industrial, the scientific and the political. The dark graphite hollows out the surface to create intense depths and the images can appear as a landscape of dark caves or even, to some viewers, as some strange and extraterrestrial landscape. Nayar deliberately plays with the spatial ambiguities of what is being perceived.
Similarly, Nayar wants to foreground the fact that seeing is not a transparent, netural act, as in Looking at You Looking at Me, a set of five drawings that hold fragments of parts of the human eye - rods and cones, the fetal eye, a gathered tear drop in the tear duct, retinal blood vessels - as seen through different systems of magnification. The work is physically positioned to “look” at the viewer who is in the process of looking at it. If her work is replete with hyper-real images of the world produced through the advances of science, equally, Nayar appropriates and transforms what she receives. In the process, she frees herself from being limited to direct contact and replication of reality. Further, when she renders these images on large panels - in front of which viewers can be made to feel diminutive and step away - their perspective is altered; equally she renders work on very small panels that force the viewer to come close and look inwards. Since Nayar does not want her art to be seen as asserting facts, again and again, she recuses herself from any attempt at finalizing a reading of her work. There is always the possibility for it to be something else, and not be confined to exactly this or that.
If articulations of the classical could be read into Nayar’s art, this poses the question: What is classic or timeless about her work - is it the geometries of the wooden panels, the materials, the idea of her artwork, or the high modernism of her minimal palette? How does “framelessness” work here with reference to edge or fragment? How does such a classicism work in relation to the fact that she rarely frames her work, for example, a strategy associated frequently with post-World War II American and European modernism or in relation to the idea that the canvas/wooden panel is the primary site on which she stages the origin of her image? In works shown in this exhibition, such queries fuel both the creation and interpretation of her work.
Lately, as she has begun to incorporate photography, video, animation and bookmaking, the classicism, the abstraction and the conceptual seriousness are made further complicated by the interpenetration and cross-pollinations of genres and themes between her drawings and new media.
Obsession
Nayar’s use of hyper-real images that verge on abstraction are the result of an obsessive desire for both visual minimalism and complexity. There is a profound desire to create deep concepts out of such conflicts. As the works demonstrate, Nayar plays with the visual possibilities of the seemingly abstract, and its location. By drawing in an expanded scale - whether the microscopic details of the human body or of her environment - and often by bringing literature or text into the art work, Nayar seems to break with the legacy of geometric abstraction and its focus on pure form. What develops then, in her work, is a very convincing minimalistic practice on the enlargement of an essential idea through very dense drawing. To achieve visual density while maintaining its clean, minimalistic aesthetic, Nayar’s work consumes a great deal of time and labour. For viewers as well, her work demands time to really look and understand how to see things in her way.
Nayar’s ability to express herself through text, and her close involvement in the contemporary literature scene in India has also given her the capacity to mediate her works to her audience through her own writings. Sometimes she also uses text as a layer that both advances and deliberately undercuts legibility of meaning, and the tactility of visual pattern - so that in several works, texts develop into design elements or surface embellishments. She places the text in such a way that viewers cannot access them easily.
For example in Under the Skin, a set of three drawings on round wooden panels that play with images of Black, Asian and Caucasian skin cells, the text is placed along the sides of the work in a manner not straightforwardly read. The words related to skin in a variety of ways with references to the fairness cream industry, quotes from Rosa Parks, the African-American civil rights activist and lyrics from a Bob Dylan song (2).
While the texts relate directly to the politics of skin colour, Nayar does not “instruct” us as to where we are to stand as Asians and Indians, émigrés or immigrants, the post-colonial or the cosmopolitan; the questions are posed based partly on her life experiences, and the answers are left to be devised by the viewers. Nayar says: “With most of my art, the thinking, examination and realisation of the work is informed by the scientific, socio-political, cultural and historical landscape of the times in which we live. Or from incidents in my life. However the creative expression of these ideas isn’t activist or agit-prop but rather a distillation of, and meditation upon, the issues at hand.”
Nayar is a contemporary artist whose engagement with her practice as an internal query counterpoised with the external world has led her to several experiments. Apart from a core interest in the fragmentary, the spatial and the scientific, she has engaged with other areas of contemporary thought and practice - in exploring cinema as an important episteme of contemporary society, for instance, or with iterations of the figurative, especially as balanced against the abstract. Multiple schema of expression as part of the contemporary art practice in India today, is a freedom of expression that Nayar has incorporated into her practice; she is presently located in more than one aspect of contemporary art. But as The Ambiguity of Landscapes attests, her interest in the hyper-real, and in abstraction and minimalism, has remained at the heart of her investigations.
Text by Annapurna Garimella and Sindhura.D.M.Jois
Jackfruit Research and Design
Notes
(1) Throughout her career, Nayar has explored the possibilities offered in several genres including writing. In this essay, Nayar has contributed in writing to the interpretation of her work.
(2) Panel 1 has this quote from Parks: “I didn't want to pay my fare and then go around the back door, because many times, even if you did that, you might not get on the bus at all. They'd probably shut the door, drive off, and leave you standing there.” Panel 2 bears the following text: “The High value of fair skin has resulted in the market for fairness creams and bleaches touching Rs 2,000 crore in India a decade into the new Millennium. Lightness creams for men is still a fairly small segment - Rs 186 crore, according to Nielsen - but one that is growing at a fast clip of 31 per cent.” Panel 3’s text are these Dylan lyrics: “He come to the door, but couldn't get in/All because of the color of his skin/What do you think about that, my friend?/Me and my gal, my gal's son/We got met with a tear gas bomb/I don't even know why we come/Going' back where we come from.”
Bibliography
Mehta, Anupa (2007), India 20: Conversations with Contemporary Artists, Vadodara and Ahmedabad: Alekhya Foundation and Mapin Publishing.
Mercher, Kobena, ed., (2006), Discrepant Abstraction, Cambridge: MIT Press.
Richard Judith Ochs, ed., (2004), Inside the Studio, Two Decades of Talks with Artists in New York, New York: ICI.
Vergine Lea, (1996), Art on the Cutting Edge, A Guide to Contemporary Movements, Milan: Skira.