OJASVI MOHANTY: Someone draws a flower on a wall beside a bed

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Caution! Wet Paint (2009)

Title of my work exhibited at the SAA Galleries, JNU as part of the exhibition – Someone draws a flower on a wall beside a bed.

I wanted to explore the kind of denial of access very similar to under-construction sites in cities. That denial which seems to work so much more surreptitiously in different public places too, regarding what class of people ought to enter which (so called 'public') place. Moreover, it was interesting to get the audience's reaction to the pieces under different circumstances. ( text : Sabih Ahmed )

Putting up an individual piece of chair in the gallery would label it as art and therefore change the viewers approach to it, so we decided to spray-paint only a few chairs and mixed them up with the other chairs in the gallery. Some were placed at the gallery and some downstairs where people gathered for a smoke or a chat.

Special thanks :
Alana, Sabih, Rocky and Satyam for helping me out with the process and logistics.

As you please (2009)

Title of my work exhibited at the SAA Galleries, JNU as part of the exhibition – Someone draws a flower on a wall beside a bed.

Work Statement :
During my student days in Baroda, I was fascinated by the cheap egg joints that thronged the streets. Eating at one of these places one can’t help but notice the colourful trays in which they store the eggs safely. And as the cook starts preparing his dishes, the eggs start diminishing one by one, and not necessarily in a linear fashion. My work owes its origin to one of these trays and the playful composition vis-à-vis the negative and positive spaces on the tray, much like how a dot-matrix printer works. Here the trays here become my ever-expanding grid in space and the probabilities of composition innumerable.

Based on my observations at the numerous egg larries, I've tried to re-create the graphics that owe its birth to the extempore compositions on an egg tray. The title tries to convey the fact that since the trays become a grid and the eggs pixels, I could almost do anything I wanted. I did make an entire set of alphabets, but somehow the idea of a graphic/icon meant more than a few intelligent words. So I settled for a empty speech bubble, which stands for the myriad possibilities.

Special thanks :
Alana, Rocky and Satyam for helping me out with the process and logistics.