From here to infinity
The Penrose Triangle, on display at the other end of the gallery.
The elegant young woman who walks into Gallery Sumukha on Thursday afternoon, proves right away that she's full of surprises. At 29, new media artist Tanya Mehta is besotted with the metaphysical and the many wonders that the human imagination has to offer. This translates into fantastical works, deeply rooted in philosophy, science and poetry that come together to explore the idea of infinity.
Unity in Opposites, Mehta's latest show, was several years in the making - "Each picture takes between a week and three months to create," Mehta says, walking over to Only Man Dies of the Cold, the first of the series. A red hammer and a lantern sit perched atop a long crack in a sheet of ice under a canopy of radiant blue sky. "This took a little over a week to get right," she said, pointing at the cracks. "The pictures are of a frozen lake in London, but I couldn't get those cracks just right. I broke open some ice cubes at home to take a series of photographs." Hundreds of photographs go into the layering of each work - for this, Mehta dips into her trusty (and enormous) database. The Penrose Triangle, on display at the other end of the gallery, comprises about 700 layers and involved the restoration of a 150-year-old photograph of the world's first scuba diver!
We talk technique, but it's concept that truly intrigues Mehta, whose first brush with philosophy arrived as a child, through her mother's unusual choice of bedtime stories! "She would teach us about Plato and Socrates," she smiled. "The bug first bit me when I was about six, or seven. It made me want to learn about science and literature and psychology,” Still, finding a passion that tied these varied interests together proved a challenge. Mehta lay sprawled across her bed in university, when she was all of 21, wondering just how to bridge philosophy with photography and electronic image art. “I’m a very visual person at the end of the day, that’s why this is my medium. It helps me express the many dualities of being, too.”
This she does, with concepts as simple as night and day to those as complex as juxtaposing melancholia with contentment. Melancholy, is a photograph of an Australian prison inmate from the 1800s,” she explains. “It’s a strong emotion and some people enjoy that state of being. By contrast, Contentment explores the intensity contained in serenity. It’s about taking your circumstances and making something of them.”
A poem accompanies each picture - “I’ve always loved writing and poetry, we were encouraged to understand the arts as children. And Khalil Gibran has had a profound influence on my life - his writings are a moral code to live by, which I suppose I do!”