MENDING CRACKS: Beyond
Exhibition: SEPTEMBER 29 - october 18
“Mending Cracks: Beyond” explores disability, trauma and the complex process of recovery.
How do we respond to pain, personal and political, individual and social? In these works, we see struggle, acceptance, resilience, protest, and action, woven together in a series of portraits in watercolour, acrylic, and clot, on tarp, paper, and canvas, and arrayed on hanging Xray sheets.
The X-Ray sheet installation stands here at the entrance, like pillars at the entrance to a temple or other sacred site, adorned to welcome the visitor.
View the Virtual Gallery (image details available on desktop view)
Dissent
There are many ways to respond to trauma. We find our response, at times, in silence and introspection: the explorations of “the body broken,” here, can be said to represent this position. We can focus on actions, pragmatic and concrete, to better things. This is what I explore in the work, “to heal.” My new body of work, “Dissent,” links pain to protest, to the demand for change in social as well as personal terms. Our world today is filled with voices seeking change. The portraits I have been working on seek to personalize protest, and inspire appreciation of its embodiment, and represent the figures who act in its name. In this way, the works seek to understand the ways individuals are shaped by the violence of oppression, but also how they come to speak out. In the history of art, portraiture was reserved for elites: for those in control of the world. Here I seek to portray those who challenge such control, who seek out a different order. These figures, too, must be a part of our artistic repertoire.
The ruined landscape
With these water colours, I explore the landscapes of human pain, and the land itself as a living force, experiencing loss and pain. This series represents also my coming to terms with the landscape of my own injury, confronting the ground itself that buried me, a distrust in the land that has haunted me. This links these works, most directly among all the works, to a process of mental healing for me. At the same time, these works also speak to the physical landscape of all loss. In this time of crisis for our planet, and the damage we have done to our earth-home, these works speak to a crisis for us all.
the body broken
Art is filled with bodies. The classical European tradition is grounded in exploration of the human form. Classical sculpture in South Asia, too, embraced the human form, both in royal courts and religious places of diverse kinds. Time has enacted its toll on these forms, and we come to know them – today – in their broken form, remnants of a past that stand in silent dignity, now complete in their incompleteness.
I began creating these meditations on the broken body of the sculptural form in India in 2007. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I think this was my way of working through the loss of mobility and strength in my arm, and the damage to both body and mind. I have maintained this theme, and include here new work alongside this earlier work, as parts of a whole. The works are created in diverse media – pastel and watercolour on paper, acrylic on canvas and tarp – to explore the body and its vulnerability.
The focus on Buddhist and Jain figures here evokes also the fundamental insights of these traditions: the experience of suffering in our attachment to the world, and the way the body must be inhabited in a way that allows us to move through and beyond it.
to heal
These works are constructed out of x-ray films; they include both films given to the artist by a hospital in Bangalore, India, and those of family and friends. These act as physical markers and measures of pain and trauma. In truth, injury is beyond measure: the attempt to measure it lends it a false solidity. “Healing” is not so simple as the physical representation of it might imply. That is perhaps the comfort of the film, and its limitation: it tells us something, but it does not tell all. Such films are themselves disappearing, as xray practice moves to a digital form. They represent, then, a further kind of loss: what remains of the measure of our pain, when nothing represents it in concrete terms?
The “drawings” on the film are constructed out of medical gauze: an intervention in support of healing. They represent the exercises I did, when I was recovering from surgery that was done on my arm after I came to Canada. That surgery changed my life: they opened my arm and redirected a nerve so that my thumb was repositioned to come into opposition with my finger, and I could move it slightly. Suddenly, fourteen years after the earthquake, I was able to use my hand again to grip something, at least minimally. The pictures of the exercises I did reminded me of mudra, the hand gestures deities and religious teachers in South Asia are represented with, to teach, comfort, and invoke power. I created these mudras on the x-ray sheets to bring their healing force upon these measures of pain. The process of creating them, itself, was painstaking and difficult. I was only able to do it because of this new functionality of my hand. So, in this way, the work itself is a measure of my healing.
Artist Profile:
Raghavendra Rao K.V. (Raghu) was born and raised in Bangalore, Karnataka (India), where he also attended Ken School of Art. After completing his diploma in painting, he received a fellowship in painting at the Kanoria Centre for Arts in Ahmedabad, Gujarat. As a young emerging artist, he participated in ‘Four Young Contemporaries’, curated by prominent artist, Rekha Rodwittiya, which highlighted new artists in the blossoming contemporary art market of the early 1990s in India. He explored the idea of installation art along with his peers since its early days, and participated in numerous solo and group shows in India, Europe, and North America. He has undertaken residencies in Switzerland, Scotland, and Mauritius, as well as numerous locations in India itself, and a major collaborative art festival in Lille, France. He began teaching at Srishti Institute of Art, Design and Technology in Bangalore in 1997, and has taught there occasionally since 2012. He lives on Bowen Island with his wife and two children.
ARTIST STATEMENT:
'Mending Cracks: Beyond'
The central theme of this show is disability, trauma and the complex process of recovery. It began with work that emerged out of my own experience in the 2001 earthquake in Kutch, India, when I was buried under rubble for several hours. Among other injuries over the whole of my body, my left arm was partially paralyzed. Since then, over the years, I have watched its slow atrophy. Alongside this, I found myself faced with a further battle to get over the experience, psychologically as well as physically. Through this process, I realized the complex meaning of “mending.”
It took me about fifteen years to develop the courage to work on this experience. Moving to Canada helped me understand what I went through and to some extent what I go through even now, dealing with PTSD. The physical distance from where the earthquake and the trauma attached to it occurred may have helped me in dealing with it more directly.
This show reflects work along these themes, from the initiation of the series to what will follow it. The initial series of work titled “Mending Cracks: Limitations,” was a set of watercolour landscapes that depicted loss, and at the same time, a sense of hope, represented here by the series entitled “The ruined landscape,” and a set of meditations on the body as a site of both pain and resilience, here, with the series “the body broken.” These two series are paired with an installation of X-ray films with drawings created with medical gauze, entitled “to heal,” which explore the effort (almost always incomplete) to mend. Some aspects of these were exhibited in Bangalore, India and at the UBC Asian Centre in 2016 and 2017, and some are new.
“Mending Cracks: Beyond” also looks beyond my personal experience to others’ experiences of trauma, and gestures towards my new emerging work, which is called “Viewing Dissent/Dissenting Views,” represented here in the series “Dissent.” At the beginning of this new journey, I am looking at the struggles of the oppressed, the expression of protest, and the experience of pain. Here you see two aspects of this emerging work. First, a series of small miniature-like portraits of people from various places, from Palestine to Delhi, from British Columbia to Mexico, inspired by incidents of both oppression and protest in different parts of the world. These figures are accompanied as much by absence as by presence, to focus on a moment of action. Second is a triptych, large in size, that evokes classical European murals.
My research on trauma and art production has shown that often, works on trauma and healing are assumed to target a specific audience or special group, rather than a broad public. Such work is often seen as therapeutic to the creator. It is my goal with this work to reach out to a broad audience to communicate the experiences of trauma and healing as something we share, in different ways. In this way, it brings us together.
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SAVE THE DATE! JOIN US FOR THE ARTIST PARTY SATURDAY, OCTOBER 2, 6 - 8 PM
Tunes by DJ Yeshe. All are welcome!
View the event details HERE