The different categories, how the show was divided were as following.

1. my father’s medical journey
2. 1984 Sikh Riots
3. Panel Drawings
4. Scroll Drawings
5. Cut Outs placed as intervention in the gallery
6. Cluster drawings
7. Instagram like drawings
8. Gestural line Drawings
9. The Nehru Place drawing
10. The two sketchbooks ( reproductions )

 

Each one of these categories represent a time frame, a certain time in my life where this is how i wished to express what i was going through. It’s the maximum i could think, the utmost maximum my mind could push itself to perform with the pen tool on paper. This is how much could think and create and draw out from my imagination, memory.

The Father’s medical journey is a book like work. Its when he passed away and I expressed everything i could, of remembering the most recent of events till the time he died. It’s what he shared with me in his last days during his stay in the hospital.

The 1984 riots is something i revisited as a memory after 35 years. I was 11 then, when the riots happened. I visited Janakpuri after such a long time to see what it meant to go back to a place and then draw.

The panel drawings are of a moment of living in Navi Mumbai, where i drove and some days took the local train to seawood mall from Kharghar to Seawood, a distance of 15 km and sit in a starbucks mall near its window walls and work with a .01 rotring bought from a store at Vashi. These drawings were about how a comic book box functions, how narrative goes from one box to another. It was opening up a fantasy like world. I wanted to travel, walk, go into this landscape and see where it took me.

The Scroll drawings are in two parts. The two smaller scrolls are from 2017. Where one character becomes male / female / imagined gender and the orgy like drawing finds the same character repeating itself throughout the drawing. The Scroll occured after i exhausted myself in the small size drawings of the category – Cluster drawings.

The two larger scrolls were the most recent works made in 2019 just before the show. I wanted to explore density, of everything i was thinking, seeing, such as seeing my mobile all the time, the instagram, the whats app messages, and constant bombardment of gifs, emoticons, how we as a society keep responding to each other with the aid of technology. The scroll and its infinite space made me keep pouring out ideas, expressions into its space till i felt i could just go on adding and or not add anything else.

The Cut outs is something i places after being in the gallery for two days. One day all the works were put up the carpenter. Every category was placed up on the walls. In this time, i was seeing the place. The second day is the only day i had to myself and keeping true to the title of the show, i only intervened with basic small cut outs with the place which reflected how i had been responding to different places in the past five years. No attempt was made to create and put a cut out which otherwise would reflect something which i had not done in the past five years. So these were conversations i had, how the space made me respond and what immediately came to my mind after seeing the objects in the place.

The Cluster drawings were done in the second half of 2017. They were in continuation from my 2014 Solo Show. I pushed the thought and found energy in creating a cluster with objects, forms all connected to each other. My interest was drawing a line. This can be seen in the form of small frames and a larger 22 x 30 drawing where there is more play of the clustered form and the empty space around.

The set of Instagram like drawings are random selection of pages which form a narrative as a cluster of framed drawings. They reflect how i pushed thought as a daily exercise. how i exercised how you can simply go on pushing the idea of what is thinking and drawing. These works give an insight into how I think and how drawing occurs when you think.

The Gestural line drawing set is part of a larger set done in 2014 and is imagined as pages of a cartoon movie where exploration is done through exaggeration.

The Nehru Place drawing is intermixing the places around me, with maps, routes in which my character as i draw enters the fantasy world of human forms and imagined landscape.

The two sketchbooks are reproduction of two sketchbooks created as a way to push the idea of thinking in a sketchbook. A singular form, a part of a human’s anatomy is used to narrate a story.

The Solo show is titled – What i did everyday.