Art show looking back at India blends reality, vivid fantasies

Detroit News Story!

Michael H. Hodges / Detroit News Arts Writer

With "Contemporary India," Gallery Project considers the art of the Indian diaspora -- often of the first generation of children born in this country, far from the ancestral home.

The artists' reception for "Contemporary India," a group show running through Sept. 20, is Friday evening.

Works by the 14 artists span the creative spectrum, often appropriating traditional motifs to apply to untraditional ends.

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Photographer Neil Chowdhury, 42, was raised in the Detroit area, and didn't visit his father's homeland until he was an adult.

The work he shot over one year attempted to reconcile his vivid fantasies from childhood with what he calls an often-jarring "masala mix of complexity, misery and beauty."

"Street Madness" is a montage crowded with overlapping, impossibly layered photos. The work, Chowdhury says, was prompted by an inability to capture the visual depth and confusion of India's great cities with his straightforward documentary work, also on view here.

And to be sure, the maddening crush of Indian life is one of the mostly common reactions one hears from the first-time visitor. "It's actually one of my less-clever titles," he says.

Chowdhury, who heads the photography department at Cazenovia College outside Syracuse, N.Y., acknowledges the universality of response behind "Street Madness," but adds that however stereotypical-sounding, the press of humanity is perhaps the defining element to urban life.

"I was trying to deal in one image not just with the density," he says, "but also the hierarchical nature of society." Indeed, the montage begins at the bottom with the wretched who are sleeping on the street, while images of Bollywood greats smile serenely far above, some caught (characteristically) in mid-embrace -- a nice, ironic substitution of the secular for the religious.

"At this point in history," says Chowdhury, "it's the Bollywood stars who are minor deities."

Also well worth a look in the exhibit is Bari Kumar's "Esse," a portrait of the classical multi-armed Indian god, albeit in this case headless. The half-naked figure sports sea-green skin and two arms raised in a pose that can't help but call crucifixion to mind.

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