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Everything Happens Twice
Ravikumar Kashi |
Bangalore based painter Ravikumar Kashi during the ocassion of his travelling solo show in four countries turns and looks at his works and their concerns.
As an artist I see myself as a witness to my times. I am as much a witness to my times as to the ways it is being re-presented in the media. I am also a witness to the visual culture around me.
I have the habit of collecting interesting photos, image clippings, discarded objects, headlines, quotations and the like. I suppose one can think of me as a visual scavenger. This becomes a bank/source of imagery when I start working.
In my work, most of the imagery comes from this archive that I have compiled and photographs which I have taken. Everything comes filtered through a secondary source resulting in the construction of a secondary reality. Something curious happens in this filtration process. Media projects objects, people and experiences with a certain ‘tinge’. This ‘tinge’ is carried over to my work because of my scavenging.
I also have a diary, where I keep jotting down ideas with visuals and text, which becomes a starting point and triggers my work. From that stage it takes off and grows organically.
The format/experience of my work is akin to flipping through magazines and newspapers or watching a TV. Think of a wall of televisions in a store, each tuned to a different channel. Hundreds of images are all talking at the same time, in a hyper-textual visual narrative. The connections do not seem forced, so much as nearly random.
While scanning through the channels we come across various images, incidents, but by habit we watch each channel in isolation: advertisement image for a tooth gel as separate from the image of terrorist killings, which one saw a moment ago in a news/ documentary channel. When this flow is seen as a continuous stream of images, associations and the contradictions that arise are mind-blowing. Fiction, news, documentary and reality - all get mixed up. The violence, blood and gore one saw a moment ago in a Hollywood action movie start shifting over to news channel when you watch daily news. Many of the villains in movies are so well dressed that they could be modelling for clothes. In between, ad guys entice you to spend, consume and be happy; there is nothing wrong with this world, after all!
Each day I rummage through these images from out side world.
For me, everything happens twice.
Once, in reality, and second time, in my work.
‘City without end’ Ravi Kashi’s forthcoming show
The new set of works have some different attributes compared to Ravi Kashi’s earlier works, which were done in the last five years, but there are some similarities as well.
Apart from the interest in urban experience, the main theme of the work is also an enquiry into the process of generation of meaning in a work of art, and the interaction between images and text as well as different forms of communication like sign language, Morse code or Braille.
Ravi considers the new set of works as a consolidation of his efforts in the last few years, though he has made some shifts, appropriating borrowed and popular imagery but subverting their meaning to make them say something different than what was originally intended.
This set of works is a combination of works done on canvas using oil and acrylic and hand made paper works cast in pulp.
On the road
‘City Without End’ will be shown in four cities. The show is being sponsored by Gallery Sumukha and will be shown in Chennai, Bangalore, Palo Alto - California (USA) and London, UK.
20 – 30 December 2006
Gallery Sumukha,
BTS Depot Road, Wilson Garden, Bangalore.
6 -20 January 2007
Gallery Sumukha
121, St. Mary’s Road, Alwarpet, Chennai.
16th February – 9th March, 2007
Gallery ArtsIndia West,
PaloAlto, California USA
15-21 April 2007
Air Gallery
Dover Street, London, UK |
