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| Gowda Sheela Born in 1957 in Bhadravati, India. Lives and works in Bangalore, India. Crime Fiction Caligo memnon, a butterfly, is a fascinating example of mimicry. On its folded wings are mimicked the staring eyes of an owl. The wings seen from another angle reveal a serpent head. Facing the butterfly, who am I? I am not the snake, nor the owl. They are my predators. As the predator, I see my predators on my victim, in my victim. Darwinists say mimicry is explained by the need of avoiding to be eaten. Vladimir Nabokov, ornithologist and writer, thinks that Darwin’s Natural selection could not explain the miraculous coincidence of imitative aspect and imitative behavior, when a protective device was carried to a point of mimetic subtlety, exuberance and luxury, far in excess of a predator’s power of appreciation. Loss is a selection from photographs taken by Abdul Gani Lone, a Kashmiri who had a compulsion to record the turbulent times around him, which saw many young men taking the path of militancy or “martyrdom”. Whenever there was a death Lone recorded it. He collected an object of the dead person, a photograph of the boy/man from his family to add to his growing record. He photographed the path the body traversed, from the place of the funeral rites to the graveyard, showing the streets at various points when life did not seem disturbed from the normality of its daily routine -views, which inevitably foregrounded the snow capped mountains. This is the Kashmir that is eulogized: “If there is heaven on earth, it is here, it is here, it is here”. But these streets were not innocent. The seeming banality of these photographs was the ground on which I could legitimately step on, to present to the viewer a scenic view of Kashmir while memory walked alongside, whispering another story. As an artist using these photographs, I was careful in selecting only those, which did not implicate the viewer through a direct gaze. I was particularly careful of not working upon the source images but chose to paint an extension of a cloudy sky to a truncated landscape, in one. Lineup In the bylanes of a market for bulk buying, in a shop which sells items used in rituals, I came across pieces of sculpted wood which were handmade but mass produced. As long as the material (a particular red wood) and the semblance of a human form were met, a bare resemblance was adequate. I was fascinated by the “identities” created by the incidental pressure of a chisel edge. In Line Up, these little sculptures become individuals under scrutiny in a police “line up” -a recognition of little variants of the outward appearance would pin one of them as the criminal. The fact that these dolls are traditionally used as a double of a person in certain rituals, came as an underlining to my own appropriation of them. Sheela Gowda April 2nd 2009  Download CV |  Loss, 2008 Crime Fiction, 2008 Line up, 2008 |
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