A Wanderer’s Visual Diary

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For an artist anything could act as an inspiration, be it time or the place they hail from or travel to. Artist B Ajay Sharma’s works depict his journeys within himself and through various cities using the metaphor of a humble fruit from a childhood memory, writes Nisha Aggarwal.

Artist B. Ajay Sharma

B. Ajay Sharma’s art practice tries to develop a language through the construction of ideas which embodies the contradiction of dualities like life and death, being and nonbeing, past and present, male and female, scientific and philosophical, and concrete and noetic.

In a direct way, his works are about the recreation or of rediscovering. This kind of intense catalogue of information he has found from his native place Deoghar, where he was brought by his mother reciting stories. Going back and finding occurrences and visages and reinserting them with the contemporary situations is a peculiarity of his art. Because it is a constitutive raw material which a lot of people just block or find insignificant, making grownups problems more important.

Story of A Garden

Apart from his childhood his major content for works comes from the ritualistic milieu of Varanasi, a place where he lived while pursuing Bachelor of Fine Arts from Banaras Hindu University. This is a parallel project he undertook with experimentations in time and space before moving to New Delhi. He came to Delhi initially to continue his Fine Arts studies with a Post-Graduation at Jamia Millia Islamia.

Thus, starting his journey from small places of Bihar and Jharkhand, Vaishali and Deoghar, he travelled through places like Kolkata, Varanasi, and finally reached Delhi, for obtaining education and livelihood. While his journeys to places like Maharashtra, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh etc. add dimension into this wanderer’s diary, the places he has lived and travelled, provides him with an enriched account of history, culture, nature, geography and political situations of respective places. All this makes a narrative existence in his works juxtaposed with the reality of time and place, which he experiences in his current location Delhi.

Prophesy of A Starry Night

He has connected these shifting and changing notions of rural and urbanized world, through the form of a simple fruit like papaya. Being passive of its travel from a village tree to a metro-city market this papaya form directly comes out from his memories of childhood. Later on memory combines the experiences of time and he visualizes the papaya as a vaginal form also. He has tried assimilation of different narrative voices. There is not only recognition of multiple levels of culture and language but also an effort to draw them, and his divergent preference together. It expresses the desire to go beyond the individual ego and achieve a new individuation by reconciling multi-voiced narration with self-expression. This entire spectrum makes its presence in Ajay’s art with a fruit form which boasts the various aspects of life and the world around him.

Transformations

Thus, as an artist and a vigilant traveler, Ajay has been an observant of geographical, political, socio-cultural and physical transformation of minor and major things, which he tries to depict through his paintings. The past here is translated into the real, the present, and this attribution of language provides him the addition of layers upon layers. Indeed he is always aware of the magical properties of the artist’s power of attaining transformations of one image into another, of time present into time past. This speaks of Ajay’s own perception of attending the process of Transformation. But the paintings are also meant to have a heightened presence in the moment of viewing. It posits an interactive role for the viewer, an opportunity to experience creation and absorption and to sense the timelessness in the present moment.

Hsuan-Tsang and Kasturi Mriga on Google search

Ajay comes from a carpenter’s family, where hand skill had been a means to earn bread, Ajay integrated the skill with vision. He is ardent enough to carve a niche for himself, which belie the brims of stark realities and experiences of his life. He started with drawing and painting, and these days he is triumphantly practicing with digital media and photography.  He was awarded a two months residency ALTlab 3.0 Photography Residency at Goa Centre for Alternative Photography (Goa-CAP) in 2013, which initiated his interest towards alternative photography. He exhibited his photo-prints developed out of alternative photography process (Van Dyke, Cyanotype, Gum By-chromate) at Taipei Photo Fair 2013, Taiwan. More recently his paintings have been shown at India Art Fair 2014 by Neilson Art Gallery, Spain.

(First Appeared online in CartanArt Magazine, Issue-IV, April 2014)