Gathering seeds #8
10 things on my mind this month.
March seems to have quite a welcoming vibe to it as the onset of spring brings the touch of floral promises for us all. I’ve been a little quiet in this space for the past month as I worked on my latest solo presentation with a local gallery in my city. After a year of imaginative incubation, it feels good to come out and gift the world with its enriching results! I sometimes feel like the communion around art sits close to the boundary of that around spiritual traditions; we gather to revel in meaning and attempt at untangling contradictions together through an openness of inquiry, which I find to be very cute.
On that note, here’s a list of 10 things that currently have my attention:
I’m a sucker for projects that blur the distinctions between art and design, and lately I’ve been charmed by the works of Allan Wexler. I came across his book ‘Absurd thinking: between art and design’ that documents his 45 year long inquiry into muddying the dichotomies between fine and applied art. There’s a practicality to his madness and vice versa, which reflects a crazy dedication to his childlike sensitivities with a skillful bypassing of limitations.
Allan Wexler, Hearing Aid (2016) There’s something about the artist Rachel Youn’s chaotically endearing kinetic sculptures which I find hard to distinguish from a robot funnily learning how to adapt to its burgeoning intelligence. The industrious perfectionism of machines meet the abstract funk of humanness. I wonder what this in-between state can be called.
I’m extremely obsessed with the Andromedan outfits in Bugonia. Not to mention the erotically charged, biomorphic interiors of the spaceship itself.
This slide from Virgil Abloh’s lecture quoting Rem Koolhaas:
This short lecture on God as Conciousness by Rupert Sheldrake (daddy of the morphic resonance and solar mind theory)
As I think a lot more about enchanted architecture, it was interesting to come across James Turrell’s designs for ‘Autonomous Structures’: unique architectural spaces designed for shaping the perception of light and space. I’m deeply inspired by his approach of merging his artistic sensibility with architecture as a medium to touch the sublime/transcendent. These structures remind me so much of Buddhist stupas, sacred hemispherical altars designed for prayer and meditation, which I encountered on my trips across Ladakh and Himachal Pradesh. There’s something uniquely soft-science fictional about the way it brings devotional and futurist aesthetics together.
James Turrell, Autonomous Structures (1989-2010) 
James Turrell, Cold Storage (1989) This painting of a soft, ghostly apparition by Tala Madani.
Tala Madani, A Solo (2019) I’m rekindling my obsessive reading habit again. And as I fall back into the rabbit hole of science-fictional literature, I’ve realised that creating the right ambiance is key to supporting my imaginary forays into interstellar regions by playing Pauline Oliveros in the background. While reading Isaac Asimov’s ‘The Gods Themselves’ (which is a book I highly recommend) here’s what I played to set a cosmically attuned mood:
This poem by Terry Nguyen:
The title of my current solo exhibition ‘I Seem To Be A Verb’ is after the eponymous book by the American Polymath Buckmister Fuller. His futurist thinking has had a great influence on the ways in which I develop my own worldbuilding practice. The book itself is quite a visual treat and you can read it here :)
With warmth and a lightness of touch,
Rithika
xo