Nayanika Ganesh’s parody of Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring is likely to have the Dutch painter turning in his grave. The winsome, pretty face of the original tronie has been replaced, by that of DC comic super-villain Silver Banshee, swathed in ultramarine and honey silk but wearing a skull in her earlobe instead of an iridescent pearl earring. In a similar vein, da Vinci’s Mona Lisa now bears the face and flame-red hair of eco-terrorist, Poison Ivy while Frida Kahlo’s Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird has been replaced by one of Wonder Woman (with the distinctive unibrow, of course).
Michelangelo’s iconographic depiction of The Creation of Adam now represents the birth of Superman; God, grizzled and clad in swirling robes that bear a DC symbol on the chest, is flanked by multiple comic characters including Green Arrow and Hawkgirl.
“I love comics,” says Ganesh, one of the 14 young artists of Chennai’s MAISHA studio who is part of Outside the Lines, an ongoing art exhibition held at the Lalit Kala Akademi. She especially likes the artwork, she adds, which is perhaps why her work is so thickly influenced by them.
Of bodies and minds
Passion is translated into art in other canvasses too. Take, for instance, Sanjana Tara Ramanujam’s mixed media abstract bearing her own footprints, “I dipped my feet in gold paint and walked across,” and a pair of ghungroos. “It connects the two things important to me,” says the artist, who is also a dancer. Her other work is equally emblematic: a gilded miniature mask fixed on a portrait of lotuses (Serenity); more lotuses sharing a frame with Shiva and Buddha, “I wanted to compare and contrast the two,” says Ramanujam, admitting that she loves the bloom.
An artistically forged, if grotesque, medley of body parts find themselves into Aswathy Biju’s mixed media installation, Bone Apple Tea. The title, a play on the phrase, “bon appetit”, and the concept came from, “an essay I once wrote on a putrid banquet,” says Biju, adding that this was a visual interpretation of it. The decaying chunks of meat, a headless human body, partially masticated bone, the heads of various animals and birds are interspersed with decaying red apples, “mostly for colour”, all fit into the larger theme of, “absurdity”, that runs through all her work.
Bodies segue into the mind when you come to Abinaya Selvanatha’s work. A mosaic of broken glass portraying a butterfly emerging from its cocoon, “symbolises a person getting out of a slump or rut. While another painting of a hand holding a Venus Fly Trap (The Trap) is a metaphor for how social media “gets you hooked and feeds off you.” Then there Maya (Illusion), that uses symbolism from three popular stories ( The Fox and the Grapes , The Goose who laid the Golden Eggs and Guy de Maupassant’s The Diamond Necklace to talk about negative emotions like greed and jealousy.
Art for change
Zehra Marikar’s, three-panelled acrylic board installation on which different coloured bits of paper are stuck are representative of her relationship with her sisters.
“I am part of triplets. Each of us are incomplete as individuals but together we are whole,” says Marikar. Then there is her mixed-media on paper, titled Distance that portrays two frames, each bearing a naked man and woman respectively, whose hands reach towards each other but do not touch to indicate, “the physical and emotional distance in a relationship.” Also, both the figures’ heads have been replaced by tangled string to indicate the mess this can cause.
In addition to the work displayed by the students of Maisha, is a series of paintings by the children of the SIP Memorial Trust, Kolathur, a home for children with HIV. “We held workshops there last month,” says artist Aishwarya Manivannan of Maisha Studio, who has spearheaded this entire project. All 47 of these paintings, created under the guidance of these artists, are available for sale at the gallery.
“The proceeds of the sales will go directly back to the home,” she says. The project, is driven by the larger goal of getting her students to share their knowledge and create impact with skill, she says. “They should know that art has the capacity to change.”
