#TG Life
Six artists from two cities - busy, crowded Ahmedabad and the tiny metropolitan state of Goa have come together in this multi-threaded exhibition Tales of Two Cities opened at The Project Café. The exhibition curated by Kirti Parihar and Samira Sheth will be on until April 15. Samira Sheth shares, “The universal language of art threads these overt differences between these varied places and artists into a unifying common understanding of the human experience. The flow of people, the generation and regeneration of ideas and ways of expression lead to a constantly changing artistic landscape. Multiple creative possibilities unravel from a host of works that surprise and delight, provoke and disturb. These unique forms of expression are the stories we want to tell.”
Six artists from Ahmedabad and Goa tell their stories through diverse media “ using watercolour, oil, colour pencil, thread and even newsprint.
Alpesh J Dave from Ahmedabad pays tribute to iconic artists, in thread images of Dali, Rene Magritte and Jackson Pollock. In another small format work he leaves threads hanging to hint at the constantly evolving and therefore unfinished state of an artist’s ideas.
Goan artist Liesl Cotta De Souza also uses thread to paint. Her subject is women as they work and play. Layered in colour, perspective and emotion, these are everyday stories of struggle and pleasure told through embroidery on textile.
Manish Modi from Ahmedabad takes a childhood spent with newsprint, his father had a newspaper agency and Manish even sold the occasional paper, to paint on the daily depressing background of newspaper. If you happen to read the ‘news’ created carefully by the artist though you will be pleasantly surprised. Far from the daily deaths and crimes and news of inhumanity that we have all got accustomed to, these are quirky references to animals and their symbolic importance and other pleasant ruminations. Animals offer a potent visual representation of ideas here carrying forward a long and rich history of animal symbolism in western art. Ideas of the diversity of nature and the importance of preserving it also come to mind.
Animals again loom large in Ahmedabad based Purvi Parmar’s colour pen and acrylic paintings. The young artist creates space for her ‘self’ in imagined worlds atop the bustling cityscape of Ahmedabad. She images sheep, a couple of slender deer and a peacock in full form as central figures in these fantastical universes created entirely by her.
Laila Vaziralli from Goa finds inspiration in nature too with a series of dreamy yet dynamic and softly subversive watercolours. What are her frail women protagonists doing “ are they playing with the rain, tumbling and dancing while they lay claim and reclaim what is rightfully theirs (and ours too) “ a free and healthy natural environment to just ‘be’ in?
Says Samira Sheth in her curatorial note, “Laila’s light hearted imagery comes through as a surprising form of resistance against the violatory powers that be, becoming a personal creative attempt to protect our fragile environment.”
Nature is sacrosanct and should be protected and worshipped. As guardians and custodians of nature, humanity is in need of protection itself. Ideas of the sacred abound in Sonia Rodrigues Sabharwal’s portraits of Gods and Goddesses of Goa. Strongly rooted in Goa, Sonia invokes the spirit of its deities for succor.
With their highly individualistic thought process, each artist presents a story worth heeding. Says Samira Sheth, “Even though they seem such disparate stories one realizes that everything is indeed connected ““ somehow all these visuals coalesce to bring very different tales from two very different places to life.”
