Dissonant Images
Dissonant Images is a presentation of three solos of artists Koralegedara Pushpa kumara (Colombo), P.S. Jalaja (Kochi) and Parvathi Nayar (Chennai). Each solo engages with the philosophy of our place in the world, in essence functioning as an attempt at mapping the constructs of our relation to the elemental by drawing connections within our scientific, environmental, political and cultural truths and myths. The relationships between self and image/ image and image, often registers a dissonance, seemingly unrelated in the way they are conceived and consumed thereafter. They tether between the real, the imagined, the possible and expands on our understanding of their implicit cacophony and chaos. At a formal level, artists work within the tropes of painting and drawing as an oeuvre, questioning how far they can push their 'aesthetic' and towards what end.
K. Pushpa kumara develops a language with a self-invoked iconography located specifically within the civil war his homeland witnessed between1983-2009. His use of the barbed wire, razors and 2 x 2 poles as well as tarpaulins in his large-scale paintings is in a similar vein to artists such as Norman Lewis - a way to confront the potency of a (post) conflict space down to its basic vocabulary out of the need to ensure narratives are not erased or rendered invisible.
