Reconnecting to Expression

Humans have an innate need to express themselves. This need for expression is inherent to the human mind. To think of it, even our genes expressed chemical data to multiply and carry forward the information. Like the genes learnt to multiply; the neurons learnt to talk and communicate. This form of expression that is so intrinsic to humans, later developed into drawings, paintings, poetry or even dance. It was all expression in some form to carry the information forward right from the cavemen and their rock paintings to the historic scriptures to the present day information technology. What once began as a form of expression manifested itself into various art movements that we know today. These art movements are a direct implication of the evolution of mankind and it’s socio-economic situations present in that era.

For example, Dadaism which was the art movement that formed during the first world war consisted of countless artists, writers and poets that took to exile in Zurich. As the war progressed their art became extremely dissident and anarchic in reaction to the state of affairs. They exposed the accepted and often repressive conventions of order and logic by socking people into self awareness. They protested against the pointlessness and the horrors of the war under the battle cry of “DADA”.

As society supposedly developed, the movements delved into aspects exploring complex emotional and psychic structures with expressionism and surrealism respectively, rejecting the idea of what seems rational to the human mind and championing the irrational, poetic and revolutionary. The art that is done today is spread across a lot of fields. There is visual arts, conceptual art, digital arts and even art in collaboration with science. Today however, some claim that the art movement resembles dadaism, also called neo-dadaism because people today are facing the repercussions of  the invisible war between humans and the disconnect between themselves and their immediate reality.  Humans today are in the state of disillusionment and in the pointless journey to deplete their own resources, moving further away from the sensual and unadulterated realization of life. Let us just leave this question of what this movement will be called to the future historians. For now, let us just talk about some of the artists shattering the glass ceiling through their work which is relevant to this time period.

One such pioneering artist who uses realism or naturalism to create an awareness about our exponentially depleting resources is Zoe Keller. She says “Drawing has a unique ability to collapse time and space and collage things in a way that highlights the interesting ways that ecosystems function”. You cannot draw something accurately unless you know how it functions. Her works are like a documentation of the species not extinct yet. Zoe Keller uses graphite to draw various ecosystems and wildlife highlighting the at-risk species. Her work which seems to be so daunting actually captures the interconnectedness of the fragile nature that we live in. She collaborates with the scientific community and rigorously researches her subjects through self expeditions and on-ground experience through those ecosystems. It makes us appreciate the delicate intricacies around us. It encourages us to slow down and observe it more keenly to understand the grand design. It highlights biodiversity at risk in an era of human driven mass extinction.

With the advancement of science and technology, we are moving further apart from the tangible reality. This does not mean that technology is bad; it just means that we need to gain a whole new perspective to approach technology itself. Technological advancements were inevitable but the intangible and disconnected realm in which we are present today needs a more emotional or human approach.  One such artist who is breaking new ground and is my personal favorite is Adrian Segal. She is a contemporary sculptor and mandala artist. She is on this quest of bringing tangibility to science through her arts. Her mandala art also has a unique approach to entice the spectator into a state of realization as well as awareness of various socio-political scenarios. I may mention about a lot of her work below but bear with me because it gets really interesting.

 “Sculpture is the aesthetic language I use to bridge the gap between reason and emotion”  ~ Segal’s work is the interpretation of the rational, objective and scientific data or for that matter any information and converting it into a much more human, emotional, tangible form. “I interpret the poetics of statistical information by translating data into lines, forms, and materials that reveal abstract concepts and unseen phenomena as communicative, sensory, and aesthetically engaging artworks”. Her work  “California Water rights”  signifies the water consumption of California which is much higher than the naturally available water source. 

 We all know how geography classes used to bore us in our school days. It had tons of data and graphs and maps but what if I told you this sculpture is actually a representation of one of those data?

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Segal’s work  “Molalla River Meander”  is a sculpture of 15 years of alluvial (soil deposited by flow) flows of a section of Molalla river. That sculpture right there is a history of 15 years from 1995-2009; even showing a new tributary which was formed due to the floods between the years 2005-2009.  Although the structure looks pretty simple, if we pause and take a moment to appreciate it, we will realize how much of an effort is put into making something this exceptional. It seems like art on it’s face but has many technical skills and data study underlying them all. It is remarkable how she can capture the flow of time and it’s stories of floods, destruction and re-construction into such a simple structure.

Now, let’s shift a little bit to science, shall we?  Many of you probably dozed off during those optics classes in school; so let me keep it precise. Albedo’s effect is related to sea ice and studying energy absorption of the ocean and its warming. Ice has higher reflectivity. Due to polar amplification, the ice melts, creating dark areas of the ocean that absorb more light as it’s reflectivity is lesser than ice. Hence as a feedback loop its temperature increases and  in turn melts the ice even more. This next sculpture shows this phenomenon with all the temperatures and absorption changes creating these beautiful patterns and surreal light play. Pictures and visual representations speak more to us than any chants and slogans of climate change and global warming and Segal’s art does exactly that leaving the spectators spellbound. In a world where we are constantly fed toxic propaganda under the tag of content; her art is the purest form of escape that we can find building a sense of self introspection and change.

Her next and the final work which I want to write about and is my personal favorite is the Wheat Mandala series. We know mandala art as this boho style of art that people on instagram use to decorate their rooms. It consists of repetitive and symmetrical patterns encompassed in a circle. Well, Segal found a way of telling stories even through these. Her mandalas explore the narratives of complex history of wheat cultivation, human impacts, famine and human failures that caused them. The mandala format draws attention to the historic shift from religion and divine intervention to scientific inquiry, and offers a sense of stability and introspection. You can spend hours looking at her mandalas thinking about all the historic events, the struggles and the cascading effects of those decisions in history. To incorporate so much information and emotion in a single art piece is a work of sheer genius.

This mandala is called ” A year without summer”. It begins with the eruption of Mt.Tambora in 1815 – the largest volcanic eruption in recorded history in which ash was dispersed around the world, blocking the sun, lowering global temperatures, and causing worldwide harvest failures and major food shortages across the Northern Hemisphere. The lack of grains to feed horses inspired German inventor Karl Drais to research new methods of horseless transportation, which led to the invention of the draisine, an early form of the modern bicycle. That same summer, the author Mary Shelley, vacationing at Lake Geneva, was forced to stay inside due to the unusually inclement weather. Shelley wrote her influential novel Frankenstein (The Modern Prometheus) after engaging in a competition with her traveling companions to see who could write the best horror story.  

The second mandala is called “Man made famine”. It represents catastrophic human failures that have resulted in mass famines throughout history to present day events, caused by social, economic, and political decisions. Imagery includes reference to Stalin’s Five Year Plan of Industrialization and subsequent Holomodor (also referred to the Great Ukranian Genocide in 1932-33); Chariman Mao’s Great Leap Forward involving mandatory agricultural collectivization resulting in the Great Chinese Famine; and finally the current humanitarian crisis in war-torn Yemen in which at least six million people are facing imminent starvation.

All of Segal’s work are tragically beautiful with a social and philosophical message in every field that we can think of. Zoe Keller’s work  captured the complex, tangled and interdependent world around us in it’s most intricate element making us realize what could end in the near future. Both of them and many other such artists delved into fields not very similar to their own. But for them the division does not even matter, what matters is giving their conscious thought a form. It is through rigorous study and technical prowess that these people can contemplate the subtleties of the world around them. We watch movies, paintings, read poetry and often times move on form them the very next moment. For something to really impact us, we have to go back from where we started; expression in it’s purest, untainted form, expression that speaks to our inner psyche, that speaks to the purest of human forms, the naked human form. Every step we take, every speech we understand is a form of expression by our body built through years of evolutionary information stored in all of us.  We just need to give that expression an authentic and transparent medium. So take a moment, and look into yourself, your surroundings and the people around you. What do you observe? What is the raw and naked form that you really observe?