Description

This work captures the artist's sense that after a period of expansion of the global village in the late 1960s, the world was starting to shrink and slow down by going back to an older way of life. This is visualized through a collage of imagery from newspaper and cartoon clippings contained in an egg or womb shape in the centre. An image of Marvel Comics superhero, Daredevil, a blind lawyer with heightened agility and enhanced senses, lies prostrate at the top pierced by the artist's arrow doodles. Below, a hand holds up a shruken world. Below that, there is imagery referencing an older way of life such as horses (transportation), a blotter, an old-style coffee urn, dishware, vintage map, a daguerreotype (early photography), and kerosene lanterns. The artist's doodles in black marker around the collaged materials reinforce these associations, including the spinning wheel (chakra) at the top that became a powerful symbol of nationalism, referencing pre-modern handmade cloth, during India's independence movement. The plastic lace doilies that frame the top and bottom of the work reflect the artist's interest in low tech media forms. He likens his approach to art-making to jazz music, improvising on an inutitive level between abstraction and realism, colour and monochrome, paint and ephemera.