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June 2006 New York- Bose Pacia presents recent work by
Yamini Nayar and
Sreshta Premnath from July 18th through August 19th. There will be an opening reception with the artists on Tuesday, July 18th from 6 to 8pm. Bose Pacia is located at 508 West 26th Street on the 11th Floor, in the Chelsea district of New York City. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday from 12 to 6 pm and by appointment.
Yamini Nayar presents large-format digital photographs of imagined environments, delicately constructed from an assemblage of found objects and archival photographs. Each evokes an alternate reality, replete with historical and cultural associations. Suggestive of a lost era, Being There and Sincere present interior spaces of declining grandeur. In contrast, Note to Self depicts the lowliest of domestic spaces with its bare mattress and lone coffee cup resting on the floor. Yet this mundane space is elevated by the charming inclusion of patterned embroidery on the wall. Her practice endows the humblest of objects – a coin, a shard of plaster, a crumpled bit of aluminum foil – with uncanny significance, eliciting nostalgia for an unknown place and time. Through her meticulous and poignant arrangements, Nayar explores the illusory power of photography and the ambiguous space between fantasy and reality.
Sreshta Premnath's work is also occupied with the themes of representation and truth. His Verheyen's Cabinet project takes as its point of departure the biography of Philip Verheyen, a 17th century scientist (in)famous for allegedly performing dissections on his own amputated leg in pursuit of knowledge. Whether motivated by his own phantom pain or a pure quest for truth, Verheyen serves as an enigmatic protagonist at the dawn of the ages of empiricism and colonialism.
The amputated limb provides a concrete image for the paradox of disembodiment…. The paradox lies in the persistence of the body that insists upon the presence of an absent element. (Pieter De Heijde)
His Implements for Amputation series and Collaged Images from Philip Verheyen's "Corporis Humani Anatomia both leave the viewer far removed from the object of origin; the former being photographs of the artist's own drawings inspired by 17th century illustrations, the latter being grotesquely beautiful constructions collaged from photographs of 17th century anatomical drawings. In creating these multiple layers of distance, the artist alludes to the manipulation of truth which can occur the further one strays from the source. Yet in A Thousand Apologies, acknowledging the source or root of origin is a hindrance to the fulfillment of ones' desires, a reference perhaps to the burdensome legacy of colonialism.
Yamini Nayar graduated in 1999 with a BFA from Rhode Island School of Design and obtained her MFA in 2005 from the School of Visual Arts in New York. She has exhibited at numerous venues throughout the East Coast, including at the Queens Museum of Art and the Studio Museum in Harlem. The artist lives and works in New York.
Sreshta Premnath graduated in 2003 with a BFA from the Cleveland Institute of Art and obtained his MFA in 2006 from the Milton Avery Graduate School of Fine Arts at Bard College. He has participated in several group shows in Cleveland and New York and has had solo exhibitions in Edinburgh and Bangalore. The artist lives and works in Annandale.