Nature’s spell
5 Feb 2015 10:33 PM GMT
Exhibit 320 and British present Sonia Mehra Chawla’s compelling new body of works. Titled Scapeland and comprising Photopolymer etchings, videos, and paintings in mixed media, the exhibition presents the artistes’ continuing engagement with the natural and organic world. The works are a result of several years of research and documentation of ‘sites’ in diverse locations. The exhibition will be on till February 18 at Exhibit 320, Lado Sarai.
Sonia’s work is concerned with the construction of ‘nature’ that is defined not just as the physical
world around us but also, and especially, the conditions of our physical, metaphorical, social and ecological interactions with it. The artist develops new tools and strategies through her practice that unsettle conventional wisdom about our relationship with and within nature.
There occurs both a sense of disorientation and identification with the feeling one has of being inside one’s own body. What interests the artist is how such discussions become a metaphor for contemporary or postmodern experience in general.
‘In order to experience a landscape you have to lose your feeling of space’. It establishes, despite the most intriguing artifices, its grip and hold on time. In fact, the landscape simply seizes time. It demands the immediate deflagration of the mind and obtains it. Eventually, Scapelands become places without a destiny.
Sonia Mehra Chawla was recently awarded the Charles Wallace India Trust Award for Visual Arts by British Council for her project, and for her commitment towards research in innovative Fine Art Printmaking Techniques like Photopolymer Gravure.
In Scapelands Sonia carries her preoccupation with germinative and gestational energies into a robust engagement with the landscape. Instead of the micro-ecologies of the body’s interior, she embraces the macro-ecologies of rivers, mangrove zones, rock formations and forests, studying them scientifically while translating them into the microcosm of the image.
Where: Exhibit320, Lado Sarai When: On till February18
Sonia’s work is concerned with the construction of ‘nature’ that is defined not just as the physical
world around us but also, and especially, the conditions of our physical, metaphorical, social and ecological interactions with it. The artist develops new tools and strategies through her practice that unsettle conventional wisdom about our relationship with and within nature.
There occurs both a sense of disorientation and identification with the feeling one has of being inside one’s own body. What interests the artist is how such discussions become a metaphor for contemporary or postmodern experience in general.
‘In order to experience a landscape you have to lose your feeling of space’. It establishes, despite the most intriguing artifices, its grip and hold on time. In fact, the landscape simply seizes time. It demands the immediate deflagration of the mind and obtains it. Eventually, Scapelands become places without a destiny.
Sonia Mehra Chawla was recently awarded the Charles Wallace India Trust Award for Visual Arts by British Council for her project, and for her commitment towards research in innovative Fine Art Printmaking Techniques like Photopolymer Gravure.
In Scapelands Sonia carries her preoccupation with germinative and gestational energies into a robust engagement with the landscape. Instead of the micro-ecologies of the body’s interior, she embraces the macro-ecologies of rivers, mangrove zones, rock formations and forests, studying them scientifically while translating them into the microcosm of the image.
Where: Exhibit320, Lado Sarai When: On till February18
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