Across history maps have signified
certainty and its limits. Measurement produces power, earth becomes territory,
and through cartography, an order of things is codified. Until: it is contested,
trespassed, refuted, redrawn and reimagined. Today, machinic opticality allows
a greater degree of control over measurement—live satellite feeds replace
measurement by foot, cosmic phenomenon is shrunk to the size of phones, and
what resides beyond the realm of light under the sea can now be viewed on our
oblong, incessant screens. These technologies of capture generate ever new
reams of data to be analysed and understood, yanking at us to keep apace.
Against this storm of “progress” that rampantly erases worlds of knowing, the
artist turns to gaze at the wreckage of our pasts. In Blueprints of Another
Time, maps now obsolete and assigned to erasure, are salvaged by the artist
as not relics, but living documents—containers of a past that albeit silent,
has more to say. In turning to discarded, forgotten maps, the artist reshapes
the relationship of time and terra—using haptic, multisensory and speculative
ways of navigating old routes. Time turns tensile. No longer linear—it can
loop, spiral, rupture to produce infinite fractals, conjunctures, and confluences.
Such radical formations emerge from periods of extensive research and the study
of natural and cosmic phenomenon, from dark matter, geological forces and
glacial time to magnetic fields and the chronicle of the sky. These acts of
peering through instruments of knowing—such as telescopes—leads the artist to
more mystery and doubt, drawing her to that which resists sight, that which is
steadfastly invisible, unknowable, refusing all attempts at edification except storytelling,
fabulation. The artist asks the questions which the archive cannot accommodate.
What happens to an absent star? Is the land an unruly clock? What binds matter,
and what releases it?
Against the seriality of timekeeping and
the conceits of linearity, the works presented here warp and weft varied
durations—often folding journeys, passages, cyclical and diurnal movements upon
one another; compressing hours, decades, minutes into the alchemy of
printmaking—a process that submerges temporal residue and indexical trace
within hybrid chronologies. Places appear as resonant spectres, tracing a
disparate geography that is defined by the personal—the artist’s trajectories
into the stories that are held in almanacs of matter. Foliage, stone, monument,
river—each hold imprints of routine, departure, wandering, and return. In vivid
cyanotypes, aerial maps of fields are drenched with the affective charge of
colour, transformed into a prismatic, ineluctable sight.
Blueprints of Another Time is a compass to the invisible yet eternal, that which must be found
through a devotion to sensing the score that every being leaves on another, however
infinitesimal, however evanescent its vibrance—from the cosmic to the granular.
Arushi Vats
2024
No comments:
New comments are not allowed.