Shailesh BR

"My ideation begins with several drawings that serve as illustrations of my everyday thoughts like rituals or blueprints and documents the possibilities of my work. It imagines the construction of a device that may eventually be an object or exist as a thought. I deal with complex ‘machines’ and simplify them in terms of their physicality and function, to make them more representational of human needs and/or want; just like mechanisms sometimes exist in society irrespective of their actual necessity. Raised in a small village in South India without access to basic electricity during my childhood, my introduction to mechanics during my higher education greatly fascinated me. This fascination with my practice is applied to solve queries and answer questions of philosophies and existence. My practice remains a reaction not only to an object/practice that I see and interact with, but also its sensibility, meanings, practical, conceptual or metaphorical connotations. I thereby “repurpose” objects to alter their function and inject them with of satire to criticize its political, social or cultural significance.

Before art, I studied Sanskrit. The play between an external beauty or functionality of a form/object, its inner meaning, extended connotations, and the consequential critical analysis of the object is what is embodied in the Tarka Shastra way of thought and is what excites my practice as well.

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