Experimenter presents Raster – Emerging from the Grid an exhibition featuring work by Rathin Barman, Astha Butail, CAMP, Nabil Rahman, Julein Segard and Praneet Soi.
Raster – a rectangular pattern of parallel scanning lines followed by the electron beam on a television screen or computer monitor, or any electronic device is the modern day grid or structural format within which we live our lives. Raster Form – Emerging from the Grid, explores ideas of formal and informal structure in contemporary artistic practices, visual representation of material and form; appropriation of space and architecture; geological studies and maps; the built and natural environment, offering possibilities in breaking away from the framework that the grid encloses one’s field of view with.
The exhibition proposes to embrace the grid’s attributes — its confinements, its mobility and elasticity, its economy and anti-monumental character, its exploratory nature, its facility for acting as a mediator and its applications acrosss disciplines, translating abstract concepts into form. Using the grid and the structures that represent it at its core, the participating artists show works that are notational, diagrammatic, intuitive and reductive. Works in the exhibition seem to emerge from the grid, or represent the grid and push the limits of its structural confines. Varied in scale, delicate, playful and highly nuanced, the grid suggest a level of intimacy and enables a direct encounter with the artists’ thoughts and intentions that maybe less readily apparent upon first encounter. The processes that emerge from keeping the grid central, thereby explore the productive tensions between rational calculation and subjective expression, conceptual thought and material form, and precision and disorder that animate much of the work on view in this exhibition.
The use of predetermined parameters of the grid-form complements these distinctive practices, and seem to provide a means of organizing thought, tracking time, and perhaps bringing a sense of order and consistency to the multiplicity of influences and mediums that inform these practices. The raster/grid serves a vital means of making sense of the world around and the forces that animate it, mediating rather than mirroring our lived condition. Praneet Soi shows a series of drawings on graph paper that reflect architectural and other motifs recurring within his practice. Astha Butail presents a series of books that are interactive where participants share stories seated around a square table. The books, which are often structured on grids, find a way to break away from its confines and accumulate new meanining when used as mediums of sharing. Artists negotiate with industrial conditions, shaping their everyday lives by engaging systematic and programmatic procedures to guide their work. Refering to the pronounced engagement with seriality and repetitive marking, charting, and diagramming, the works on paper by Nabil Rahman offer a means not of adopting the rational logic of industry but of highlighting art’s potential escape from it. On the other hand, Julien Segard’s, painting and Rathin Barman’s sculptures use the faculties of material, form, explorations of spatial dimensions and architecture. CAMP presents a cyanotype from their durational work on saling boats on the west coast of India, the Gulf countries and east African ports. Breaking away from their expected grid representation in maps, the work spreads out an entire geography and seaports laden with history of trade and relationships that go well beyond the documentary elements of maps. Instead they re-appropriate the grid and their usual references that are seemingly apparent and in turn provide a new context to it.
Raster Form – Emerging from the Grid provides a point of entry into how artists view the basic form of the grid across a wide range of practices spanning but not restricted to drawing, sculpture, installation, painting, bricollage, assemblage and moving image to challenge their normative boundaries that grids offer and provide an alternate way of emerging from it.
