Sunday, December 11, 2016

Artists and Articulations- II

Leighton Pierce

Interacting with Leighton Pierce, some one who moved to the video genre, starting off with pottery then moved on to sound before discovering Video, was a picture in contrast in many ways to that presented by Gary Hill.

Leighton's approach and art comes across as more abstract in nature. His art is a result of amalgam of techniques and technologies. It is impossible to hazard a guess or visualise on what his work would look like on production.

Leighton was again very open in sharing with his working modalities. He goes out every day with his still camera and randomly shoots for hours together of images from daily life. The way he clicks his images, with an expanded shutter time and performing movements with his camera, is a key part of his art. it is a performance in itself, worth listening to him talk about it. 

He then collates these images on his system into a video presnetation.

The third part comes in the installation, wherein he has to compose his different videos to suit the space of exhibition. He is meticulous about factoring in the features of the space of exhibition while composing his videos for the installation.

Happenstace and chance are an important feature of Leighton's art. He was very candid in conceding that, something amazing happens out there in his installations and u didn't do that on purpose.

While we saw earlier that Text played an important role in Gary's works, Sound is integral to Leighton's works. Infact, sound is so central to his videos that he says he shoots video with a certain sound pattern in mind.

Sergio Chejfec and Sharmista Mohanty

This Kochi Biennale has many new features to it. it is, i believe, the first time text and performance arts are given a big space in the Biennale platform. Sergio Chejfec's novel in 88 chapters will be on display at various locations in the Biennale. Sharmista has a prime space in a room with a lovely view all for herself to project her poem in a milk white projection.

Interacting with these artists opened up ideas like how perception dies with expectation in a  Narrative and investigating on whatever happened to 'a culture of curiosity'.

Samiran Datta

Samiran Datta in his talk about his works was a picture of reflection of his love for the film and print. He romantically revisited his tryst with film and days of printing and how he devised indigenous techniques to create effects in the visual. 

Among the techniques he shared with us were, Sandwiching films; letting films to age for years and then exposing them; using sound negative to create high contrast; pictures with impression of hand; using chines ink on film; printing after reticulation- giving the print the rough texture of  a canvas; Pindrawing on films, that won him Cinematographer Balumahendra's praise and a place at FTII, Pune.

Samiran added that , the richness of many of these techniques now are easily reproduced by photoshop. It takes one back to questions raised by the movie Tim's Vermeer. 

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