Nandan Ghiya
A Longish Institutional Glitch
2012-2018
Acrylic on Photograpgh, MDF & Wood
20 1/2 × 29 × 1 in
Nandan Ghiya (b. 1980 in Jaipur, Rajisthan, India) is a young and emerging artist from India. His experimental art practice challenges our perception of the status-quo and thus presents a new perspective of the young generation from a country with long-standing histories and cultures within a fast globalizing world.
Being Hindu, the artist believes in deep-rooted ancient values and philosophies that consider reality as merely individual perception and projection. Any arrangement of form and space defines individual, cultural, geographic or economic identities. Physicality is free from the five senses of humans. The interaction of the participants within the constructed space is an interpretation of the artist as he weaves the ever-expanding sensory world he experiences as an artist into reality. By manipulating these associations, Ghiya tries to surface the Indroid from within the modern-day Indian generation.
Nandan Ghiya’s contemporary art practice addresses issues of the 21st Century and the influx of images with reference to found objects - old photographs, paintings, frames, books, memorabilia, for example he works with these images to create real- virtual digitised spaces. Ghiya pixelates portraits and images to transform a real picture to symbolise a virtual image that is a result of an incomplete download or has been zoomed into too much, with identifiable computer and internet screen icons on his artworks. However, in the case of these images, there is no way to rectify them by reverting back to an earlier page or zooming out to minimise the pixels to identify the morphed face. The identities are lost forever. Ghiya addresses the way images are viewed in society, by experimenting with the display of his work. The pictures become thumbnails (jpegs / gifs) dispersed in the exhibition space that cannot be clicked on to explore in detail in this real space. The images cannot be downloaded, they cannot be shared, and comments on them cannot be viewed by friends, friends’ friends or the public. The unique shapes of the frames, personalised by the artist for every image, come together to create a picture in its entirety - be it a webpage or a cityscape on the horizon. For the viewer, there are multiple layers and constant changes while discovering and losing perceptions of imagery and images.
Virtual space has the capacity to appear real. We commute through second-hand filtered, censored, monitored and manipulated information; controlling the way we want to be perceived. When one uploads / downloads a selected image on / from a search result on the internet, there is a conscious sense of awareness instilled. While one may feel connected, they are ironically being isolated in their created cocoon of downloaded pixels. There is also a constant search for the right answer to every question via the endlessly growing information available online through search engines and Google Gods. The amalgamation of matter is always incomplete in this amoebic spread of information that is invariably supplemented with images which, distract and divert into other levels of searches.
Courtesy of ocula.com, artsy.net