Samara Art Gallery
Exhibition open until 10th Feb 2019
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Namrata Lodaya has had three solo exhibitions at different galleries. Her solo exhibition at Samara Art Gallery brings together a body of work that underscores the artist's love for minimalism and her meticulous practice and understanding which explores the vulnerability of individual forms. She does this by consuming earthen clay, erasers, graphite and performing multiple different techniques. She painstakingly burns clay innumerable times and erases her learning and experiences. In this process, she has gone through the last tough year for her. The result is an exhibition with an installation that exemplifies her thoughts related to 'Deformation'.
Influenced by her thoughts, she undergoes the idea of forgetting the past via 'Deformation' and Sisyphean labor through the process of burning clay and continuous erasing to try and reach – 'Volume Zero'. This has led to a composition of 'huge eraser dusts' that turn her works into dynamic entities that explain and govern multiple ideas concurring on 'Deformation'. Her installations are both intuitively decipherable and bafflingly elusive.
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The usual meaning of 'Deform' is:
'If something deforms, its usual shape changes and becomes spoiled.'
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Her visualization about 'Deformation' challenges the concept of getting spoiled. Her works indulge you and make you think about erasing the past and getting deformed while simultaneously accepting the uncontrollable erosion.
Her works of art encompass beautiful layers of greys that tell a present story about how she erases things from her mind. Greys represent the current politics, emotions, financial hierarchies, gender and religious differences etc. that ultimately get deformed.
Narration of her exhibition:
Erasing everything you've experienced actually makes you non-biased about good/bad and pleasant/disturbing. You're unaffected by its type. You get involved in erasing the past with no prior attachment for some moments. This allows you to create an indirect layered work every time you erase. You can't control, the effect of erasing on paper or the eraser dust created. You gradually start accepting the uncontrollable behavior of the nature and the society around you. You create your own eroded canvas by accepting the uncontrollable change. Eraser dust and the eroded canvas still reveal the erosion and the evolution happening on it constantly. It is the explanation of 'nothing is absolute' and showing that the erased past is also not absolute.
The form is not direct, it gives the viewer an option to imagine their form in their present moment with the perception that they have, the present they want to be in, which is the viewer's ultimate tomorrow's past.
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“Erasing the past was a compulsory and an important mistake of my life. It allowed me to live again and understand the real importance of changing the future past, which is actually the present moment in a beautiful way. When something is deformed, it gives a possibility of a new creation, which can be used for a completely new purpose. If we stick with our past and our learning, we only create inspired work. If we erase it and deform it then we create an original set of works with unknown origins.
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