X’ING? LOOK BOTH WAYS

In recent years, Sharbani Das Gupta’s work has become more experiential in nature, using subtly altered relationships to question perception. In 2013, at a residency in China, she was struck by the dual nature of curiosity and wariness between the two neighbouring countries. They made her think of a wall of eyes that both revealed and obscured. In 2016, in Israel while participating in the residency Post-colonialism?, she was confronted by another border wall, with its legacy of settlement and dispossession.

Now, in 2018, at her home in New Mexico, the concrete walls of division draw near, while virtual walls of suspicion surround and separate.

In X’ing? Look Both Ways, Sharbani explores the distortion of perception created by walls. A brick maze is embedded with a succession of porcelain eyes, the pupils made of lenses recovered from dismantling obsolete televisions that the artist, mechanic’s bag in hand, scoured the countryside for. The stories of the people she met and the knowledge that these lenses were once used for projection is buried in the DNA of the work. Looking through the lenses inverts everything on the other side— a window into the mind’s eye, or a question on the reality of perception?

A Visual Arts graduate from the National Institute of Design, India, SHARBANI DAS GUPTA studied ceramics at Golden Bridge Pottery, Puducherry. She was a participant in 50 Women at NCECA’s 50th anniversary, has exhibited in China, Greece, UK, Australia, India,and the US and has won several international artist-residencies, most recently in Israel. An artist and writer, her work is in The Art and Craft of Clay by Jan Peterson, and several ceramic journals. Currently based in New Mexico, she moderated a panel on cultural appropriation at NCECA, and was recently elected to the International Academy of Ceramics.

www.sharbanidasgupta.com