An exhibition that explores applied material on canvas and sculpture / installation in steel

Puneet kaushik

Shalini Biswajit

'Metaphors and Materials' combines the mystery and ambiguity of steel and the delicacy of coral beads with the strong vision of nature's elements connecting in a fundamental way to create evocative projects that are timeless and unconventional. They rest on platforms that treat the canvas as a universal 'whole' embedded with metaphors. For the artists the canvas is a metaphoric field inspired by nature on which soft delicate coral beads and steel 'windows' create a continuum of fluid connections. Transcending matter the artists explore the paradigm of material to metaphor, for the purpose of exploring the creative implications embodied by this process. The physical qualities inherent in the material, the solidity of stainless steel, the delicacy of coral beads and pliability of wire existed to serve the irreverent purpose of the moment, in a performance or as part of a multiple.

Puneet Kaushik weaves contemporary mythologies - the coming together of human lives within the time of living. He weaves myths of contemporaneity and its tradition through the essence of the 'being'. Myths about being and existing in a social sphere, the effect of the social on the essence of the being, his mythical vision about the form/formlessness of being in reality whilst storytelling about its antithesis or its alter ego in a parallel existence."For in truth, art lies hidden within nature; he who can wrest it from her, has it" Albrecht Durer. For Puneet nature is the inherent quality of 'the being'. His conceptual and contextual framework evolves from the very notion and temporality of the latter. Through a self-created vocabulary and the use of an array of materials he creates the setting for an intervention of his truth, his own being and his own experiences. It is the exploration of the self through a process of absorption of notions and realities inverting the perspective of the assumed.

Shalini Biswajit's Ever at Rest series is cathartic in their expression of the emotional adjunct of what could be regarded as an exceptional occurrence; Trekking to Everest Base Camp, the event that articulated the series. Space is reflective of the enormity of nature, colour is a cipher, associated with symbolic and psychological schemata, the captured image detains the past within the present, a leitmotif of an experience where energy and spirituality coexists. The stainless steel 'windows' of spiritual awakening profess a representational form within a seemingly abstract idiom. They are pregnant with referential meaning. Going beyond mere aesthetics these works acknowledge biographism. Shalini often engages with the feminine as a self portrait; a grapheme that is self-reflective and journalistic where nature, figuration, space assume the mantle of protagonist.