KARACHI: They say every age is the reaction to its preceding one. The reaction comes largely from the artist community. The age we live in is marked by its technological developments taking place at breakneck speed. Artist Amna Ilyas’s attempt at trying to understand the world that has passed by and the world she lives in, the existent and the extinct in her words, in a series of brain-teasing sculptures in an exhibition that commenced at the Canvas Art Gallery on Tuesday evening, is quite special.

Everyone is aware of the raging debate on whether hardback or paperback books and newspapers will exist in the near future or not. The advent of Kindle has surprised, in a few cases pleasantly, writers, poets and playwrights. Then the arguments in favour of conceptual art compared to the traditional styles of painting and sculpting is also well documented. Ilyas does not touch upon these subjects but moves around them and sees all their implications from a reasonable distance – technological, moral and romantic.

The exhibit ‘Sent Item’ (etching on Perspex) has a lovely clue at the bottom of the artwork where ‘message has been sent’ is written. What’s been sent or not is the message of love. This is intelligent art. Imagine the blankness of romance. Imagine the pervasive intangibility of the cyber world. Imagine the vast, yawning space between an important missive and unsaid words. And it’s all done in a contemporary way, as per modern-day requirements. ‘Another Few’ follows up the issue with the same intent and a fair degree of artistic angst.

But Ilyas’s master stroke comes in the diptych ‘The Marriage of Reason and Squalor’ (paint on Perspex). The artist is killing two birds with a single stone. One, she’s paying a backhanded compliment to some masters such as Frank Stella; and two, she’s juxtaposing the ostensibly sublime and the apparently lowbrow (with the noughts-and-crosses game in the titled frame and the labyrinthine feel of the other upright frame, simultaneously studying two kinds of grids present in the artwork). Simply outstanding. The theme goes on, rather effortlessly, in the piece ‘How to Make Good Art’.

The exhibition will continue till May 1.