And so it Begins

Getting started on a new collage is very hard for me. I still haven't yet wrapped my brain around the problem of how to create these things..The technique is not the issue at all, but more the story. It seems as if the images suggest a narrative to me, but not until I physically put them together. I have no idea where the process will take me. But today, I am allowing this lady of Delhi to begin the story. She reminds me of a touristic folk painting that my parents used to have up in their house. It depicted a sari clad woman carrying a water pot on her head. She was painted in glowing color on a velvety black background, the ultimate cliche of Indian womanhood, I suppose. With supple grace and beauty, and dutiful as well, she served as the domestic goddess of my parents' wallscape.  The woman in my photograph seems a little more earthbound, but perhaps she will still inspire an idea for a new collage.

on Nature Photography

It's kind of a standard question to ask an artist how they began their work..."What inspired you to become an artist?" or some formulation of the same query. For me it was a number of factors, but one very strong inspiration was a love and connection with the natural world. In my childhood and teenage years, my idea of fun was to skip school, not to smoke pot behind the 7-11 with the other truants,  but to steal my mother's SLR camera and macro lens and spend the day in the woods and fields near our house, photographing bugs, trees, and plants. It wasn't until I began my formal training in photography that I realized that the art world had little use for such images, and my nature photography was forgotten, or relegated to images that I would make for fun, but rarely share or exhibit.

Today, the summer solstice, and my first full day at Saltonstall, as I awoke to the early sun and the sound of birds, I decided to regress a bit to my childhood, and just enjoy taking a walk in the woods with my camera, to reawaken that first inspiration I felt to begin photographing. Art? Probably not, but what fun it was to forget about all that and spend time enjoying the play of light on foliage, and play the game of composition with my camera!

Saltonstall

This is my first full day in residence at the Constance Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts. I feel very lucky to have been chosen to spend a month in this amazing place, which offers "Time for inspiration, a quiet studio, a beautiful setting, and a stimulating community of artists working in diverse disciplines." The gift of time spent away from life's daily responsibilities is really the most precious boon an artist can receive.So often work goes stagnant without a change of scenery, some time and space to recharge creatively. The last few months have been a whirlwind of teaching, as well as planning and printing for exhibitions. While it has been very gratifying to be included in so many exhibitions this summer, the details and logistics have left little time or energy for new creative work. Now I have that time.

Already after only 24 hours here, I can feel my mind relax & creative stirrings beginning. My day began early with breakfast and coffee as usual, but instead of getting bogged down in computer work, I decided to begin my residency with a long walk to explore the vast wooded grounds of the foundation. On this first survey mission I brought my light camera.....

The Blog is Dead! Long Live the Blog!

Alas, my days of blogging here are over. Please visit my new, much more active blog, and my all new website! www.neilchowdhury.com. Cheers!

Erasing Borders 2010 Yeah!

131. Erasing Borders-2010‏, Exhibition of Contemporary Indian Art of the Diaspora, Summit NJ, April 2 – June 4/10

Exhibition Curated by Vijay Kumar
Venue:
Visual Arts Center of New Jersey
68 Elm Street, Summit, NJ 07901 USA
Website: www.artcenternj.org

Exhibition dates: April 2 – June 4, 2010
Opening Reception: Friday, April 9, 6-8pm

IAAC Contact:
Amina B Ahmed – Director of Exhibitions
Website: www.iaac.us

Description of Exhibition
The Indo-American Arts Council’s 7th Annual ‘Erasing Borders Exhibition of Contemporary Indian art of the Diaspora’ features work by 25 artists whose origins can be traced to the Indian subcontinent.

This group of multinational and intergenerational artists, chosen by Vijay Kumar, reflects a broad range of life experiences and aesthetic values. The artists interpret diverse subject matter—figurative, abstract and conceptual—in a variety of media, including painting, drawing, printmaking, photography, video, sculpture and installation. The resulting works often meld Indian and Western ideas about color, form and subject.

Twenty million people of Indian origin shifted countries in the 20th and 21st centuries. Implicit in the term Diaspora are the concepts of change and adaptation. Cultural dislocation can produce unexpected and powerful results. Subject matter is often drawn from the country of origin, while many of the artistic decisions and political concerns come from the artists’ newfound situations.

Artists of the South Asian Diaspora are working to make themselves heard in an art world that is at once more competitive and more receptive to non-Western art than ever before.

This exhibition seeks to transcend the borders that confine and control preconceived definitions of Indian and Western art.

The exhibition features work by Jeet Aulakh, Samanta Batra Mehta, Nandini Chirimar, Ruby Chishti, Pritika Chowdhry, Neil Chowdhury, Erum Chughtai, Anujan Ezhikode, Reeta Gidwani- Karmarkar, Nidhi Jalan, Shaurya Kumar, Haresh Lalvani, Obaidullah Mamoon, Chetan Mangat, Urmila Mohan, Avani Patel, Roy-Bari Pinku, Talha Rathore, Rasika Reddy, Satyakam Saha, Sheena Sood, Anjali Srinivasan, Roshani Thakore, and Yetish Yetish.
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Erasing Borders at the Queens Museum of art

Curated by Vijay Kumar the exhibition, Erasing Borders: Passport to Contemporary Indian Art of the Diaspora explores the contributions of artists whose origins can be traced to the Indian Subcontinent. This 6th annual Erasing Borders exhibition will be on view through October 11.

Participating artists: Niyeti Chadha Kannal, Nandini Chirimar, Khalil Chishtee, Neil Chowdhury , Pritika Chowdhry, Anjali Deshmukh, Anujan Ezhikode, Indira Freitas Johnson, Asha Ganpat, Ina Kaur, Adil Mansuri, Divya Mehra, Samanta Batra Mehta, Indrani Nayar-Gall, Jagdish Prabhu, Antonio Puri, Alka Raghuram, Gautam Rao, Amin Rehman, Tara Sabharwal, Pallavi Sharma, Mumtaz Hussain, Reeta Gidwani Karmarkar, Haresh Lalvani,

Alakananda Mukerji, Veru Narula, Prince Varughese Thomas

Director of Exhibitions: Amina Begum Ahmed

Opening Reception Schedule:

2PM: A conversation between Mary Birmingham and the Artists

3PM: Music by Amir Elsaffar and Friends

About the Presenting Organization

The Indo-American Arts Council’s mission is to promote and build the awareness, creation, production, exhibition, publication, performance of Indian and cross-cultural art forms in North America. IAAC’s focus is to work with artists in North America as well as to facilitate artists from India to exhibit, perform and produce their work in the United States. This exhibition will promote and exhibit the work of artists from the Indian diasporic community. This exhibition will tour the NYC boroughs, the greater NYC area and other parts of the United States.

About the Curator

Vijay Kumar has curated the 2nd , 3rd and 4th annual Erasing Borders exhibition in consultation with Aroon Shivdasani, Executive Director of the IAAC. Vijay studied art at Triveni Kala Sangam in New Delhi, and at Pratt Graphics Center in NYC. He has showcased his drawings, prints and paintings in the U.S. and abroad. Vijay has worked extensively in printmaking techniques and currently teaches etching at Manhattan Graphics Center in NYC, where he was a founding member. His work is featured in many permanent collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Museum and the New York Public Library (all in NYC), the William Benton Museum of Art in Storrs, Connecticut, the National Gallery of Art in New Delhi, and the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, UK. In 2002, his work received the highest prize in an exhibition of prints by the Royal Society or Painters and Printmakers in London.

Color photos from pre Soviet Russian Empire!

The Empire that was Russia: The Prokudin-Gorskii Photographic Record Recreated



The treasures hidden in the library of Congress always amaze me when they come to light on the web. What else lies buried there?

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.

mhodges@detnews.com (313) 222-6021