Measured Metres

Measured Metres

Indrapramit Roy &  Mayur Kailash Gupta

Presented from 9th to 28th January 2015

as a SITE art space & The Collective Studio Baroda collaboration

An artist’s studio is an intimate space, set apart from the intrusions of an outside world. It is a retreat where books come to life, blank papers get covered with drawings and scribbles, and hidden secrets reveal themselves from the subconscious in ways least expected. From within this cocooned space, the artist journeys into areas outside of the ordinary, and at other times brings magic into the most mundane of observations. It is a place where curiosities are rampant, leading to experiments with different mediums and materials, and where methodologies are re-examined to produce altered perceptions. The studio becomes a place of necessary hibernation, where artists let free their inhibitions and find ways by which to develop ideas away from public censure.

Measured Metres puts together two artists who are tenured university teachers, and who as a result have only a limited window of time each day within which to engage with their own art practice. What this tight time frame then produces for them is an urgent insistence to create their art, obsessively and incessantly, making a prolific stream of ideation flow through their studios at all times. 

Mayur Gupta’s sculptures, where nature intertwines with a sense of the nurtured brought to life, are tree forms and fertility goddesses that evoke a sense of the primordial. Whittled from the wood with the practiced ease of a seductive libidinal lover, the sculptures in his studio confront you with a raw energy. These sculptures lie strewn all over his studio; some next to found objects, whilst others are kept perched upon antique furniture along with personal memorabilia scattered all about the space, making it an Aladdin’s cave of hidden treasures. Overflowing with objects and palpable ideas, his studio bears testimony to the passion with which materials are transformed to become embodied with new meanings.

Indrapramit Roy’s cityscapes appear utopian in their quiet uninhabited isolation, seemingly far removed from the violence that tomorrow may bring to them. These dwellings beckon one to find one’s space of belonging in their remoteness, to imprint them with more palpable energies of human existence within the confines of their internal labyrinth. These floating cities, excavated from desires and dreams, allow you to bring your own histories to their blueprints and to perhaps conjure a future of otherness.

The personas of these artists are found embedded in the skin of their work. Each lays bare their findings from life lived and explored, and each creates their own personal poetics from these harvested experiences. They give to us, therefore, something precious of their heart to hold in mutual discourse; where hope conjures the primitive energies of the celebration of survival, and nurtures the will to obliterate despair.

Rekha Rodwittiya