Superficiality is the uppermost layer of what we see. As opposed to it, perceived depth may seem deep, but may just be many superficial layers stacked one on top of another. Superficiality is as deep as depth itself.

Everything is on view. Surface is Depth. Live with it.

      Everything is assessed, scored, quantified and labeled. We have a Top Ten of Most Beautiful, Most Hot, people, places, things etc… fed to us, from all directions.

      Being a product of these times, the raw information that I am digesting, is exiting via my artistic expression in an equally raw form. One that is sick, raw, crude and mathematical.

      I am either a little more or a little less of what you are made of too.

      I award marks out of a 100. To me, it’s a form of abstract satisfaction when compared to 100, a subjective idealism, would derive an equally abstract derivation of beauty. It is a subjective point of view, taken by objectifying everything around me.

      VaibhavRajShah LAST SHIP, Bombay

      July 2012

In my recent works I am trying to invest a healing content. My attempt is that the viewer should be able to start a conversation with oneself before my work. In the process s/he must come out healed in a certain way.

This process helps me to unveil the relationship between objects in our surrounding environment and reveal the voices they embody.

       One of my works at Last Ship is dedicated to the celebrated musician Naushad Ali of Bollywood. This work, created with grabs from videos of songs composed by Naushadji from Youtube, speak of a peculiar estrangement of the performer in focus. This estrangement causes a rift between the time one lives in the present and the time gone by. The fine poetic articulations and the melody of the songs, however, creates a mending within.

      The still images installed in the two-room space run to and fro between one table (Mine) and the other ( Film Theorist Table) arranged in two separate rooms - a fictional dialogue between the artist and the film theorist (where both are the same; and not the same). The visitor is expected to participate by writing or scribbling down his/her thoughts on the table wherein a space is created to write.

      At large this work delves into the paradoxical estrangement that one feels from the self, in the lived city of Mumbai; its transforming aesthetics, the seduction and intoxication of Bollywood and the unnoticed layers beneath the screen/the self.       

      Shubhalakshmi Shukla LAST SHIP, Bombay

      July 2012

Each painting of mine has the new pattern for the story that reveals the inner life of my self.

I start working with patterns initially, and then they change into a narrative with a highly patterned arrangement.

      My personal beliefs change according to my surroundings, experiences and emotions. Most of the time it is about me versus me. When one thinks about something, then one thought creates multiple thoughts and then it becomes complicated. Right now what I understand about life is not to indulge myself too much into it and to detach myself from everything around me. But on the other hand, everything around me pulls me into itself. So now I have to decide what I should do. I live these days in a constant exchange between the real and the believed. In my works I am trying to depict the real as imagined and the imagined as real, and the balance between the two.

      Chandni Vora LAST SHIP, Bombay

      July 2012