Ember
GROUP SHOW
Apr 10, 2013 - May 20, 2013
- SELECTED WORKS
- CURATORIAL NOTE
- INVITE
- PRESS RELEASE
The body of work presented by Alok Bal in ‘Ember’ can be read to represent a complex range of engagements with a built environment. Complicating a simple opposition between city and countryside, nature and culture, inner and outer, these works confront the dilemmas of habitation, whether for people, animals or trees. In the painting Habitat 1, the viewer is confronted by a landscape of dried trees that have become the environment of a garbage python. On closer viewing one finds that the trees are not natural, they all are of one kind, repeated endlessly in a manmade landscape, bounded by walls. Other works reference cities, their urbanscapes, housing, dogs and men. Telling stories of men situated on the seam of inside and outside, these images offer a quirky take on the conflicted lives of men in the spaces that they have built.
CURATORIAL NOTE
The body of work presented by Alok Bal in ‘Ember’ can be read to represent a complex range of engagements with a built environment. Complicating a simple opposition between city and countryside, nature and culture, inner and outer, these works confront the dilemmas of habitation, whether for people, animals or trees. In the painting Habitat 1, the viewer is confronted by a landscape of dried trees that have become the environment of a garbage python. On closer viewing one finds that the trees are not natural, they all are of one kind, repeated endlessly in a manmade landscape, bounded by walls. Other works reference cities, their urbanscapes, housing, dogs and men. Telling stories of men situated on the seam of inside and outside, these images offer a quirky take on the conflicted lives of men in the spaces that they have built.
By Deeptha Achar
