Vijay Masharani

Vijay Masharani (b. 1995, lives and works in New York and Bay Area, USA) works with video and drawing. His works test the connections between small gestures and complex systems, asking what forces are at play, and what escapes our perception if we focus solely on details or only see the whole. With patterns that are in a constant state of transmutation, Masharani attempts to analyze this interplay, highlighting the role of the contingency throughout his compositions: across the duration of a video or throughout the production period of a series of drawings.

His videos are not the result of fixed planning, but rather emerge as montages of recorded, hand-drawn, and digitally rendered material he collects on an ongoing basis. Emphasizing post-production as a significant period of intervention, he regards each media fragment as potentially recombinable. He flays, mars, and stretches them to fit them together, resulting in loops in which the traces of his interventions into digital media are always perceptible. His videos, rooted in repetition and gradual transformation, employ techniques associated with experimental music production and non-narrative cinema. Frequently, a central visual element remains the focal point of the camera, around which the entire world seems to revolve. As an image of our perception of this world, the composited elements point to an unseen cosmos of social abstraction, unconscious thought, and discarded sensory impressions.

Thereby, the artist is always present: sometimes explicitly, through a camera pan to his own face, or more subtly, through animated interventions that deliberately emphasize the subjective reworking of the material. Additionally, aspects of the artist’s biography are encoded within the work—particularly his interest in how traversing urban and suburban space transforms consciousness, and his recent experience with illness. Through a combination of direct representation of individual elements in their surroundings and the demonstrative transformation of images and sounds, he moves between documentary modalities and artificial, abstract dreamscapes. The friction between representation and abstraction creates effects of recognition or misrecognition, estrangement or objectification, stuckness or unmooredness, disorientation or preternatural awareness.

His drawings often emerge as sequential variations of an initial motif. Comparable to the individual frames of a hand-drawn animation, the sheets in his series of drawings follow a sequence, forming a comprehensive whole, yet they defy a chronological logic. Without figurative intentions, the drawings are composed of distracted strokes and deliberate lines. Occasionally, bodily forms appear, as does the Earth in this exhibition—as an iconic image for an abstract, elusive concept of a planet that has been a fulcrum for the anxieties and aspirations of emancipatory politics ever since it entered the popular imagination.

Masharani’s accumulated marks proceed at varying velocities as they encounter blockages, split into tributaries, form reservoirs, and spill over. Thus, they aim to concatenate various qualities of cognition—altered, discontinuous, ambient, scattered, roving, focused. Through a series of reactions to happenstance, the final formations reveal a dependency on gestures: an initial mark, a compositional decision, or a collage element structures the destiny of the following steps and, ultimately, the whole work. Abstraction thereby also doubles as a language for understanding artistic practice in general. The drawings manifest different states of artistic concentration, as they are created parallel to Masharani’s video productions, and thus propel his overall practice forward.

As he moves back and forth between close examination and a broader perspective, his almost meditative works continuously ask the question: What am I looking at? This self-reflective inquiry stems from a desire to investigate the interplay between intuition and deliberation. For his first institutional solo exhibition, Masharani presents a body of work that diagrams a trajectory of an itinerant practice. His playful approach to permutation and transformation underscores the potential of these dynamics to reveal how structures can evolve and change.

The exhibition is curated by Otto Bonnen