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Lot 26

 

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Part of the suite of mixed-media works she created during a residency at the Singapore Tyler Print Institute in 2007, in the present lot, Anju Dodiya challenges the boundaries of traditional printmaking processes through her creative cobbling together of diverse images and narratives. Nancy Adajania explains that, “…as Dodiya pushes printmaking beyond itself, the process of making turns into a slow dance of improvisation: the image is rubbed or... Part of the suite of mixed-media works she created during a residency at the Singapore Tyler Print Institute in 2007, in the present lot, Anju Dodiya challenges the boundaries of traditional printmaking processes through her creative cobbling together of diverse images and narratives. Nancy Adajania explains that, “…as Dodiya pushes printmaking beyond itself, the process of making turns into a slow dance of improvisation: the image is rubbed or stamped into the wet pulp and shown like an open wound, or held in place with a stigmata of screws. This process allows for a deep embedding of secrets; it also makes space for the artist’s exhibitionist flair, her desire to stud the surface with actual objects, and not just their impressions” (“Birds in a Mirage of Gold”, All Night I Shall Gallop, Bodhi Art exhibition catalogue, Singapore, 2008, p. 9).

Meditating on the twin concepts of freedom and captivity, ease and struggle, the artist offers the viewer an assortment of printed and painted images in the present lot. Alluding perhaps to her own predicament and the way in which she feels entrapped by her artistic process, these images of mazes, leaping stags and a tiny bird on the verge of flight all seem to spill from a large head, modeled on the artist’s image, at the lower edge of the surface.

Speaking about this series, Adajania explains, “Each work may be regarded as an album or anthology of free-floating associations – with screen prints of mazes, maps, birds, horses and candles all superimposed on or juxtaposed with large and small female heads that have been drawn and digitally reproduced like remote ice queens… No single story can be derived from these mixed-media works. They activate themselves like surreal poems, where random words trigger memories and shapes of desire” (Ibid, p. 7, 8).

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