Dear Alice!
CLYDE D’MELLO
Deceiving, comforting fantasy plays its trick and keeps you cushioned from the outside world; but when reality knocks and tears this delusion apart you have no choice but to face reality. Clyde D’Mello reviews the exhibition depicting this constant struggle..
Our desires and fantasies prolong our own realities. We as humans have the desire or the want to do something tangible and amazing, yet they remain as daydreams or nightmares unless transformed to reality. Buddha who was never let out of the palace, as a protection by his father (against the outside world) had to face reality once he ventured by noticing certain realities that took him aback. The life he was leading was a fantasy, a desire that everybody has, but does not achieve. It was like an ant had bit him to face the “truth” outside his palace. Anjana’s exhibition titled ‘Somewhere Elsewhere” brings in a surrealistic notion of our personal dreams, desires and our realities. The works being otherworldly suggests influences of many artists like Max Ernst who in his time made a graphic novel ( at the time the term was never invented) titled “Une Semain De Bonte’( or a day of good deeds)”, where collages of surrealistic nature brought in dark and fantastic worlds. The gamut of the exhibition is video installations and drawings. In “untitled” (a video installation) desires and fantasy can never be caught in the palm of your hand as time slips away like sand that is that they are both tangible and intangible in its own invisible state. Anjana.K shows this with a combination of a video and installation: sand continuously flowing through a bear trap. The organic drawings by far express the subliminal entity of a surrealistic space that is both fathomable and unfathomable.
One does imagine these states in the subconscious mind yet the travesty of it being a reality is not possible as they remain as what they, just vague insertions of the mind as if the mind is continuously playing tricks on the human soul. The video installation Anima Animus is where a human heart is cushioned on a peacock nest and ants are plundering the heart. It shows that in a bed of dreams reality (the heart) always strikes back and tries to eat away our need for building our future, making us lag behind to a point where we have to start again – a paradox. In Phantasmagoric Menagerie 1 and 2 ( both conceived during the KHOJ Art and Fashion residency 2013) there is a strange similarity in the title with that of Lewis Carrol where the narrator meets a ghost and on meeting he finds out that there is nothing different between the man and the ghost. Anjana’s work is a series of images showcasing the technical animation skill of stop motion with a poetic narration. The artist delves in the notion of realities and a dream becoming a road that always continues. She brilliantly displays this with the use of mirrors and organic surrealistic forms, as one remembers in a changing room with two mirrors that the self is shown as an infinite never-ending road of parallels and that if we remain in this room we get lost and we would be lost forever unless someone from the outside knocks the door.
