T-Transformation

T-Transformation

“Among the many relationships that define the human condition, the individual’s connection to the environment is primary. The elemental background against which all our activity is played out, nature is the biggest of the big pictures. We worship and loathe it, sanctify and destroy it. Birth, death and all that is graceful and vicious between, sit comfortably within the natural web. We singular creatures’ also bloom and rot on its vast matrix, but the combination of our ambition and out gift makes us want more than simply to survive. We aspire to leave our mark, inscribing our observations and gestures within the landscape, attempting to translate and transgress the space within which we find ourselves.”

The structure of trees has been the first lessons for evolution of architecture. The pillar and the beam were adapted to be load bearing structures. The artist reconstructs the process of fashioning pillars that support flyovers. And through this process, he reminds us about the depleting trees in the urban landscape.

We explore nature in body and in mind. Humans have a unique ability to share landscape; they are not just a figure in landscape but the catalyst of change.

As Girjesh Kumar Singh exhibits his latest installation T-transformations, the walls of the historic Lalbagh garden have been pulled down to make way for the Metro. The transformation of the urban landscape of Bangalore has inspired the artist to create this body of work. The tree trunk used in this work is from trees that have been felled to accommodate the changing needs of an unplanned city.

This show is part of the residency programme supported by VAC Visual Art Collective to support young artists to work in Bangalore at 1.Shanthiroad studio gallery, Bangalore.

Review of the show:

Art Talk

Marta Jakimowicz

“T-Transformation”, Girijesh Kumar Singh’s show culminating his residency at 1 Shanthi Road Studio/Gallery (May 8 to 11), has works done in a number of media, that together bring out different but complementary aspects of the subject and the young artist’s response.

Sculpted trees “T-Transformation”, Girijesh Kumar Singh’s show culminating his residency at 1 Shanthi Road Studio/Gallery (May 8 to 11), has works done in a number of media, that together bring out different but complementary aspects of the subject and the young artist’s response. What one gets on one’s own is the inherent and persistent interdependence between the natural material of wood from trees and the art made of it, while the sculptor admits his memory of, and his respect for the organic source. Between a photographic composition forming a loose grid of branch fragments amid flowers with foliage and a large wall drawing silhouetting an old tree whose twigs gradually filter and thin out, there stands a dense row of taller and shorter pillars - some blackish of their bark and some light-coloured without it - that retain the residual shape of the tree crown branching out. The video as if documents the process of transposing the natural into the artful to be placed in the gallery. It should be appreciated that Singh is able to evoke the dynamism of the act and the meaning it imparts on the changed substance and shape, as well as the continuance of the former in the finished work, which he does with a pregnant simplicity and a rawness that suits the wood material. It is only after knowing that the show was triggered by the sight of Lal Bagh trees being cut down for a metro station, that the spectator comes to associate the truncated bifurcations of the wooden pillars in the gallery, with the structure of immense concrete supports for urban flyovers or railways. Even though, or perhaps precisely because, such recognition takes time and the artist’s words to happen, it stays with the viewer with its understated seriousness. It lets one also return to the first impression about the link between the live, organic tree and the artwork as such, reminding us through sensation, rather than intellectual definition, that we always exist somewhere around things primeval or basic and constructed both into art and into civilised technology. If the inevitability of destruction is necessary for art and for development, one can intuit there a kind of rebirth in the latter, although a tone of nostalgia or regret threads through. published for Deccan Herald dated 11th May, 2009 http://www.deccanherald.com/content/1848/art-talk.html