Artists Dinesh Khanna and Kathryn Myers showcase their works for the first time together at a photo exhibition that reciprocates each other’s creative interests. By Saritha Saraswathy Balan
The show aptly titled reciprocation suggests the way an artist responds to India: Dinesh Khanna as the son of the soil, and Kathryn Myers as the frequent visitor to this land. A blend of an ‘insider-outsider’ discourse is what it is all about. Through this show, Dinesh discovers his artistic subject-matter in rural India with unassuming folks, spirited festivities and sacred rituals radiating the fragrance of life and an eventuality of purpose. In works from Nizamuddin, the ‘beautiful’ and the ‘sublime’ reciprocate through a veiled transparence, as against the contrastingly sombre pulsating waters at the Banaras Ghats touching the last two steps of life, symbolically represented by a brass pot with a white shroud resting in eternal silence!
Kathryn relates to spaces as passages: passages of movement, of inhabitation, of time, of transformation and transcendence. All these are captured in her series of Varanasi Passage photographs, where dark spaces are illumined for the prevailing night, casting a silent-still moment within the pictorial environment, thus coaxing the viewer through an underlying geometry of a vanishing-point perspective, and with a strange chill in the spine, to look forward for a new dawn!
“The title was based on my sense of connection with Dinesh who first encouraged me to consider my photographs as a legitimate part of my creative process, for which I started creating a few series of works. Then we decided to pair bodies of work that had a connection with color or with the city of Varansi where I first met and interviewed him for my video series. I don’t feel much like an outsider anymore, as I’ve been coming to India regularly since 1999… in the last few years, even twice a year. I know that every tourist or visitor to Varanasi photographs the ghats. But the small alleys in the back interested me more in terms of photographs, than scenes from the ghats,” shares Kathryn.
On engaging with objective reality, she says: “My early work was more of an invented narrative. I always projected myself into it, making interpretations based on making the unfamiliar familiar. But now, I feel partake of a more formalist response which -I guess- is more objective. The photographs are certainly more objective because they are presented as ‘found and selected’, whereas my paintings start with objective information undergoing a series of technical and conceptual translations.”
When asked about her approach to a frame, she believes that form and light i.e. structure and composition are where it starts for her, but of course something has to grab her to inspire to frame a particular scene. There is often a magic to that, often unexpected. According to Kathryn, there is always a “vibe” to a place that is impossible to really describe. The way she relates to a painting and a photograph is different: “I have a very different instinct at work when it comes to photographs and paintings. One of the reasons photography satisfies me less is that it is too fast a process. In paintings, I slowly recreate the surfaces, using methods of layering transparent and opaque paint, erasure and abrasive techniques that often mimic the accretion of detail on buildings.”
“I know Kathryn for the last couple of years. She comes to India quite regularly. She used to keep track of my column in a magazine. We have a common interest for the colours of India and we thought that it could be interesting for us to do the exhibition together- looking at the same subject, India, me as an Indian and she as a foreigner who loves India,” Dinesh says.
“Two people can have interest in the same subject. I have spent my life here in India and is someone who is having a passion for it. I know enough people who are living in India but not as interested in the culture in the same way an artist is or an outsider who is sensitive to art. That is a grey area in the insider-outsider kind of discourse”, he adds. “I do my photography very instinctively, without putting much thought into it. Photography is anyway the kind of art form where you are more guided by your instinct than by momentary engagement. That moment actually happens because of your experience for many many years and many many encounters with that situation. Technically it’s momentary, but culturally it’s an accumulation of many years of feelings and experiences”, he says.
Dinesh says that his immediate response is normally to colour. “Beyond colour I am very fascinated by how colours interact with each other and how people use colour almost as a language in India. And this is born out of the fact that different colours have different meanings, used in different aspects of Indian life. The project which I am engaged with at present is called clour instinct on how Indian women use different colours in their garments. Pure instinct of Indian women is very well engaged with colour. I have chosen photographs from the project for reciprocation” he elaborates. “Photography is a means of expression, a way of responding to my interests- something which I love or hate. Photography is my language,” he says. The show is on at Art and Aesthetic and will conclude on January 11.