June 28, 2008

Artists have a symbiotic relationship with their art. While they are the inventors of their aesthetic creation and can manipulate it at will, there are also times when the very art they create becomes a major determinant of the directions they need to pursue.

A recent exhibition ‘A collective 9107’ by artist Ayesha Naveed was a public showing of a very personal odyssey. As much about recall and recount as about her progression in life, the show recapitulated her artistic passage from 1991 to 2007 (9107) and in doing so released her from all that she had outgrown and reconnected her with elements still relevant to her onward journey.

Viewing the exhibition as an independent entity, ‘A collective 9107’ comes across as an uneven display of the old and the new where the banal and the interesting are so intermixed that it strains the viewing experience. But when seen as an artist’s personal re-evaluation of self and aesthetic acumen, ‘a constant moving back and forth’ as she terms it, the show gains a relevant context. Inviting viewers to walk down memory lane with her, Naveed showed works that pertain to various phases of her life.

Her home environment and her academic training as an artist appear to be the dominant influences in her visual vocabulary and her technical handling of various media. Her growth as an artist is well reflected in her watercolours, portraiture and still-life paintings but these works are essentially academic exercises which merely speak about her learning abilities and the strength of the skills she has acquired.

It is when artists innovate that their true self begins to emerge and it was breaking through traditional curriculum restrictions to play with ideas and techniques that enabled the artist in Naveed to emerge. Accessing childhood references and elements from her immediate environment she has constructed a personalised body of work that addresses the physical and emotional aspects of her life where the domestic and the academic and the social and the private overlap. An interesting collection of six paintings, apparently disparate, are underpinned by just such a mix of varied influences she has been internalising.

Documenting the domestic space, she has painted a box image, apparently an old fan regulator or gas meter, next to a plug socket which speaks about the home she has always lived in. A seascape in the series is an on the spot painting during a school or family trip to Gadani beach. An old fashioned television set with an image of a superhero on the screen speaks of the all pervasive influence of the media as well as a childhood comic/cartoon addiction so common among today’s youth. Another intriguing work partially scratched in black, daubed in red and balanced off with fine grey lines evinced abstract tendencies but is just a mark making exercise.

A similar flux is apparent in a collection of ordinary photographs pertaining to domestic spaces and the digital versions where the artist has manipulated imagery to emphasise on the aspect of shifting spaces. The artist’s childhood asthma affliction is well captured in a pair of paintings depicting the normal physical self and the x-rayed version of the trauma projected with focus on the ribcage. Likewise, images of an installation she had made, cut-outs of fabrics shaped like a uterus, pertain to an ultrasound of an unborn child. She has played with light and sound, the only noise one can hear within the space is the heartbeat of the unborn baby.

The personal is of general interest only as long as the viewer can identify with the contents and Naveed’s varied collective has its moments. A number of works are visually thought provoking and some of the artist’s experimental art is on the brink of emerging into something meaningful. The potential of possibilities inherent in her work accords her the ‘artist to watch out for’ status.