Art exhibition: A Few Bricks and Secrets opens for the public

Fresh undergrads display beautiful interactive art pieces at Taseer Art Gallery.

LAHORE:
A few Bricks and Secrets – featuring three young artists – went on display at Taseer Art Gallery on Monday. Several art enthusiasts and young painters visited the gallery on its opening on Monday. The exhibition features 16 pieces by Maham Masood, Mamoona Riaz and Sanie Bokhari.

This is the first exhibition for Masood, a visual artist who graduated from Beaconhouse National University this year. She has used digital prints, photo manipulation, photo montage and wooden sculpture.

“My work takes you home and away from home... it is about the yearning you feel when you are away” said Masood. The theme hits home for Islamabad-based Masood who lived away from her family while attending BNU. “You don’t really value what you have till you lose it,” she said.  “My work features the furniture in my house. That is what builds it. Some things that have been there forever... that is what makes a house.” She said the general idea was to map the house.

“There are certain details you remember in a certain way which are not what they seem... that is what I’m trying to reproduce,” Masood said pointing at her sculpture Unnoticeable, which miniaturised her house furniture 12 times smaller than it was.

Sanie Bokhari, who completed her Bachelors in Fine Arts from NCA in January, also exhibited her work for the first time. She has used digital prints and oil paints with actual shop shutters and wood in her pieces. Bokhari said her work built on her thesis which she was now evolving. “You see scenes from a bedroom, an alarm clock, a lotion bottle, then you see doors and a lounge... depicting scenes from a house.” She said this was her personal space, her world.


Bokhari said she gathers inspiration from the things she saw each day. “[In my work] you see figures that are not there. This engages the viewer even more because when you close the shutters, you see your own reflection.” She was referring to a piece that incorporated a mirror. “This makes art more about the viewer than the painting itself,” said Bokhari.

Riaz was not present at the exhibition’s opening as she was attending an art residency in Karachi. “My comment is on how the divergence from one space to another works, and how, within us, fragments of each encounter manifest in behavioural changes. In this narrative setting I insert boxes with windows through which the viewer can peep into the knitting unit of life,” Riaz said in her artist statement.

Her work was gouache and transfer print on paper.

Zaineb Siddiqui, the curator, said “The exhibition offers a look into domestic life as an inherent part of identity.” She said the art works reflected the paradox of feelings associated with one’s home. “Where Bokhari’s work takes out literally, chunks of architecture, Riaz looks at space from an aerial perspective. Masood’s work clumps furniture and belongings... they all delve into the subject of home and disassociation from it.”

The exhibition will end on December 4.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 2nd, 2014.
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