Worlds Coming Apart
Abhay Sardesai engages with Yamini Nayar's intensely crafted photographs and Sheela Gowda's sensitively mounted installation.
Abhay Sardesai engages with Yamini Nayar's intensely crafted photographs and Sheela Gowda's sensitively mounted installation.
YAMINI NAYAR
This young, New York-based artist makes large color photographs of interiors that look like their architects abandoned them, unfinished, and decided to invite the vandals in. The room in one diptych is papered in a fleur-de-lis pattern, but all sense of domestic refinement stops there; under an armature of shredded draperies, a twisted totem, black as tar, snakes toward the ceiling. In another room, broken black floorboards appear to drop off into a blank void pierced only by a wide-open eye. Nayar constructs these odd, ruined sites on tabletops and photographs them so that all sense of scale is lost and only the uneasy feeling that we’ve been here before—perhaps in a dream—remains. Through May 9. (Erben, 526 W. 26th St. 212-645-8701.)
This young, New York-based artist makes large color photographs of interiors that look like their architects abandoned them, unfinished, and decided to invite the vandals in. The room in one diptych is papered in a fleur-de-lis pattern, but all sense of domestic refinement stops there; under an armature of shredded draperies, a twisted totem, black as tar, snakes toward the ceiling. In another room, broken black floorboards appear to drop off into a blank void pierced only by a wide-open eye. Nayar constructs these odd, ruined sites on tabletops and photographs them so that all sense of scale is lost and only the uneasy feeling that we’ve been here before—perhaps in a dream—remains. Through May 9. (Erben, 526 W. 26th St. 212-645-8701.)
SHEELA GOWDA AND YAMINI NAYAR; closes on Saturday. The better-known figure in this two-woman exhibition is the Indian artist Sheela Gowda, whose 1999 installation “Private Gallery” offers a subtle and unlikely blend of architecture and watercolor painting and a show-within-the-show. She is paired with the young American artist Yamini Nayar, who also works with installation, but translated into photographs: fantastic interiors that look both ruined and ethereal, as if winds, floods and fires had blown through them. Thomas Erben Gallery is taking important steps to introduce contemporary South Asian artists to the city. You can check out pieces by Sreshta Rit Premnath and Chitra Ganesh in a side room. Thomas Erben Gallery, 526 West 26th Street, fourth floor, Chelsea, (212) 645-8701, thomaserben.com. (Cotter)
...Something went on here – either decadent or sacred, a scriptural reading or a karaoke session. But even without knowing the event, we still feel the force of its completion. The speaker is gone. The moment is over. What makes this work shine is the wall behind the objects. Marred by scratches and stains, it becomes a canvas on its own – sad and dirty...
Brooklyn-based visual artist Yamini Nayar creates photographs of constructed interior and exterior environments to reflect upon the location of identity vis-à-vis place in the cultural domain.....
