Art
Mother and Son - Mehima & Karansher Singh: Labyrinths & Shadows
by SHAILAJA TRIPATHI
Group exhibitions, with rare exceptions, are not exactly exciting affairs but this joint exhibition of Mehima Singh and Karansher Singh is worthy of attention on various accounts.
Firstly because it's a showing by a mother and son duo; secondly because of the novelty of the subject and the material Karansher explores here, and thirdly the fact that it is almost a first exhibition by 64-year-old Mehima, who has been sculpting for almost 20 years but never mounted an exhibition.
While ‘Labyrinths' is a collection of 85 pieces - ink on mylar and canvas, interactive installations and laser etchings on wood, paper, metal and vinyl records by Karansher - his mother's body of work, ‘Shadows', comprises around 20 bronze sculptures.
The form of labyrinths and mazes remain central to Karansher's works.
The single closed curves evolved from circles, twisting and turning but never crossing, find themselves, sometimes engraved on bamboo, at times etched on vinyl records, on burnt hardwood, giclee on canvas, ink on bond and so on. Of particular interest are his works ‘Ek' and ‘Anek' in ink on mylar, which is a translucent paper.
" ‘Ek' has four random grey circles. If you were to colour them, you will get four religious symbols. The symbols become clear in another work titled ‘Anek'. I did this work post 26/11 with this idea that our religions are diffused, obscure, but once you try and interpret them, you get chaos," says Karansher.
At times, the never-meeting lines alone form the visual imagery on a piece as a design pattern but elsewhere there emerge faces of famous personalities from these lines as if they are embedded in there, like Miles Davis, Jimi Hendrix, Ustad Ali Akbar Khan, Indian Ocean, Mahatma Gandhi, Che Guevara, Ernest Hemingway, Khushwant Singh.
After animation
"First I designed a programme on my computers and then reproduced it on different surfaces in various media. Along with technology, there is also a physical process involved," says the artist who did his Master's and Ph.D. in Computer Science from IIT-Madras with specialization in Graphics and Animation. Currently, he is a professor of Computer Science at the University of Toronto.
"With four Oscars sitting at home, I felt there was not much left to be done for me in the field of animation and I decided to take a plunge into the world of art. Labyrinth, I thought was the most natural form and, moreover, they existed everywhere. While some view them as spiritual and meditative, some see them as scientific in nature, and for some they are ritualistic," says Karansher who was the technical lead on the Oscar-winning animation software ‘Maya'. He was also part of the Oscar-winning animated short film Ryan in 2005.
Mehima's decades
Mehima Singh could only go to Delhi College of Art for a year before she got married and had children.
"My parents were away for a wedding and I secretly wrote the entrance exam and once I got in, my parents couldn't refuse it but I had to drop out of college when I got married," says the sculptor.
At her children's insistence, Mehima began sculpting again but never for public display. Some fine specimens of the work Mehima produced in the last 20 years are on display in this show. Realistic heads of people she admired and was influenced by - Maharaja Ranjit Singh, Satyajit Ray, well-known French painter BMEDIalthus, and his wife Setsuko and many more - are on view in bronze. Though the originals were in terracotta, Mehima got them bronzed using the lost wax process. The sculptor's stress on expressions can't be missed.
The exhibition at Galerie Romain Rolland, Alliance Francaise, 72 Lodhi Estate, New Delhi, India concluded last week.
For more on the exhibition, Please CLICK here.
[Courtesy: The Hindu]
November 29, 2010