THE AMBIGUITY OF LANDSCAPE

09 Feb, 2014 - 09 Mar, 2014

Nungambakkam

 

The Ambiguity of Landscapes showcases how Nayar engages viewers – and locates her work within Indian contemporary art - through a kind of detailed minimalism by breaking special hierarchies of potrait , still life and landscape using highly magnified fragments from human tissues, satellite data, and imagery from particle colliders among others. The origins of Nayar’s art can be located in a transitional generation of artists that has grappled with several key concepts such as tradition, ritual, city, change, architecture, science and technology - in art as well as in the making of politics and identity; most Indian artists of this generation have expressed their ideas through traditional, modernist and post-modern India. Nayar’s core practice of hand-drawn graphite and painting is inflected by this intermediate generation, and her art also has expanded now to other media such as photography, video, bookmaking and animation. 
The visual culture of science and technology, images produced under the microscope or from a satellite may inspire her, in a small part, to critique its celebration of empiricism – but more it is used as a means of questioning the phenomenology of our place in the world. She complicates the visual qua visual in her art and explores the forms and textures revealed to us by the scientific advancements of our times. Nayar deliberately plays with the spatial ambiguities of what is being perceived.