Sainsbury Centre for the Visual Arts 26th June 2012
I stumbled upon this exhibition having been informed that it had finished. My initial view was from the mezzanine floor of the Sainsbury Centre where I was viewing an Art Nouveau exhibition. The space, when viewed from above was immediately encouraging in that it was an enclosed white oblong with two small bench seats set in the middle.
Upon entering the exhibition space, I refrained from reading the artist’s statement but took in the overall impact of the hanging. This was very deliberate and made up of various sized oblong images arranged so that the space occupied by them was sympathetic to adjoin works whilst not being in a repeatable pattern. The arrangement of smaller pieces between A0 (I think) images was subtle yet strong.
Overall the images were of trace. They all had something about them that suggested some form of human interference in the space photographed. The viewpoints and content coupled with very shallow depth of field made for imagery that suggested softness and domesticity that suggested the artist might have been female. How wrong I was to make that final assumption.
The lighting and colour within each image was handled with extreme care and there was a minimalist element to the images that suggested a deliberate staging of the areas being photographed. None of these images suggested a casual found object approach.
The image all conveyed a message based around the home or lived in environment and some played with the juxtaposition of modern living and traditional religious beliefs such as the small fairy light lit icons and images adjacent to a modern flat screen television. Other contrasts that were quietly powerful were the image of the bed with elephant motif in indigo and an apparently casually discarded pair of blue jeans lying on the edge. The blue jeans and line of elephants were the only in focus elements of the photograph. This was a very subtle representation of a conflict or indeed harmony of cultures. One wonders whether this image was one from the American shoot.
Some of the images certainly suggested they had been taken in India. This was suggested by the light and the colours within the images that were carried both in fabrics and ornamentation through to wall coverings and paint.
A video was shown of a living space shot over a period of time. I did not pay much attention to this as it seemed dwarfed in the presence of the wall mounted photographs that were immaculately mounted All the images were on dibond material with a fairly flat or satin finish.
A composite image from his “Offering” body of work was on display and this complemented the “There is Here” works. It was difficult to place the location for the pair of jeans hanging a washing line on a balcony. I suspected that this was a Calcutta shot if only to offer the contradiction of environment and culture . One wonders if the particular viewpoints chosen by Gupta would have been the same if he had only experienced the culture of the Indian sub-continent.
All in all this was the best curated photographic exhibition I have attended in the past 9 months.