Written by: Nayha Jehangir Khan
Posted on: July 15, 2021 | 
| 中文
Aasmani Rishtay by Sophia Mairaj
Self-discovery can be an introspective exploration through processing past experiences, moments of realization, revisiting personal memories and, gaining awareness on emotional fulfillment. The exhibition “Internal Landscapes - On the Wall/ In the Mind,” currently displayed at Full Circle in Karachi, showcases visual reflections of four female artists: Jennifer Rae Forsyth, Shireen Ikramullah Khan, Sirrah Ali and, Sophia Mairaj.
Their imaginative artworks have elements of collage journaling that uses colour, line and form to convey meaning. The artists are inviting the viewer into an entanglement with recognizable motifs inspired by fiction, nature, culture and literature. Each artist has their unique understanding of creating a studio practice that embodies their interests, curiosities, pictorial vocabulary and identity.
The artistic interventions are done on paper and canvas, using a variety of mediums that include ink, acrylics, magazine cutouts, pop-up construction techniques, impasto and image transfer. The intimate scale of these 31 artworks in the exhibition ensures that the viewer has to move in very close to inspect and interact with each piece. The art process feels therapeutic and cathartic for the artists as they each have created miniseries of artworks that communicate their personal experiences and stories.
Slingshot by Sophia Mairaj
Mairaj’s sculptural installation pieces have character tableaus in the shape of pop-up paper dolls, set on top of books that feel like miniature theatre stages. She uses an individual page as a tiny platform, while the rest of the book is casually folded over as if it were resting on a bedside table. She uses a random page from the Digest to prop up a variety of characters that come alive like a short movie clip. The viewer is transported into the role of the reader and the participant, as text and image merge into one piece. The books displayed are Digests, an iconic symbol of popular culture, and capture a wide readership countrywide.
There is a cinematic quality to these protagonists placed on the static text that feels interactive. The recognisable archetypes, situations and facial expressions all toy with the viewer’s imagination and stimulate elements of nostalgia for a forgotten era of storytelling that was originally through local magazine literature.
Untitled by Jennifer Rae Forsyth
Popular culture has greatly influenced a shared history and collective understanding of the world, which can often impact our present reality. Forsyth uses playful elements of collage to depict two distinct worlds coming together in her works: industrial machinery and open spaces of nature. The duality of the two opposing worlds creates a collision between the contrasting visuals that feels immediate and spontaneous.
The work has experimented with neatly stitched together visuals that create an interesting storyboard. Forsyth is in complete control of the sequence of events that are falling in place simultaneously in her intimate works. The playful nature of the series has sinister subliminal commentary that focuses on the destruction of nature at the hands of industrialization and futuristic technology. The stillness and serenity of the natural landscape in the background of the series are dangerously interrupted with cataclysmic escalators, sewing machines, industrial pipelines, and drilling machines, forecasting an apocalyptic world. The series at first looks humorous but is a deeper commentary on the fragility of our ecosystem and natural environment.
A Drop of Water I by Shireen Ikramullah Khan
Moving on, there is a weightlessness to Khan’s painterly clouds, which almost slows down time. The works have a kind of chromatography that creates romantic transitions of colour, which feel meditative and calming. Khan formulates platelets of tissue with luminescent textures that look like organisms being observed under a microscope. The impressions are gently contrasted with linework in geometric shapes that are kept broken, indicating a foreshortening of space used in drafting techniques.
These pen & ink lines are calculated to anchor the viewer’s eye, traversing Khan’s lofty colour fields. The artist is exploring emotional frequencies experienced through colour, as she is layering, revealing, concealing painterly scapes from the viewer. These transient ideas of hope, light and water mentioned in the titles of the series highlight the artist’s inner psychology, as she is engaged in a poetic visual process.
The textured pathways of thick paint on Ali’s canvases have a frenzy of movement, reminiscent of impressionistic paintings of floral gardens, lake views and countryside landscapes. There is an urgency in her mixing of colour that feels improvised and immediate. The presence of the artist’s hand is felt in each painting, as the direction of the strokes are prominent and the surfaces are deliberately textured and complex. By dominating her canvases with heavy coats of paint, Ali creates nostalgic and familiar motifs in the shape of flowers.
The artist guides the viewer on a visual walkthrough of her memories and emotions. The canvas has a fractal quality that feels like glass or water with dreamy and romantic rendering. The expression of the paint feels more psychological and personal, as the artist is intimately relying on her life experiences to energize her strokes and colour mixing. This kind of gestural painting is confrontational and immersive for the viewer. The nuances are in the details where Ali allows broader strokes to open up the canvas or restrain her brush strokes to be more controlled and repetitive.
Untitled by Sirrah Ali
The exhibition can be viewed as a singular body of work, as each artist has multiple overlapping ideation and techniques that deliver interesting imagery and a plethora of interpretive associations. Each artist is authoring a novella of visual experiences, recalling memories and attaching emotional values to their artistic choices. Understanding the struggles, stories and history of the artists brings us that much closer to understanding ourselves through their reflections in inviting and exciting ways. The exhibition will remain on display till 23rd July 2021.
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