ICONS in PILGRIMAGE
The Ramayana series, as showcased in this exhibition questions the boundaries between the term “folk art” and modernist concepts of art through the use of surrealist motifs, modern compositions and European-born etching and color viscosity techniques to recreate renditions of the traditional iconography of Mithila art. Uma Shankar portrays Ravan as the traditional firework puppet that is set alight in Dusshera to celebrate the victory of good over evil. Arrows dart across the battleground, the great beasts of war—elephants, horses and chariots—are featured amongst the dead and the wounded.The artist uses Ramayana doha, writing direct text from Maithili, Awadhi,Bhojpuri, and Sanskrit to reverentially evoke the mood of this great epic.
Seema’s works showcase a rich play of intricate and diverse shapes, forms. Her works depict the images of ancient Nepali and Indian sculpture and iconography,cultural rituals and Hindu and Buddhist mythologies. Her works are equally enriched by the well matched juxtaposition of colors, which is a tremendous achievement in zinc printmaking. Seema’s works create a unique interaction between memory and the method, using the technique of color viscosity printmaking, the works are able to play with ideas of vagueness, permanence, artificiality and transitivity of the human mind and memory. The imaginary shadows of the monuments in the skies, the many editions and imagined renditions created of the ghats, all present a distinct interaction of printmaking with the city of ghats which in itself is an ode to thousands of years of mythological, social and political memory.
