The Persistence Of Childhood

Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognises before it can speak.

John Berger opens his classic book Ways of Seeing with these words, telling us how our lived world is shaped through the ways we look at things. Our experiences can neither be explained by words, nor can it be contained in man-made images. Yet the metaphors we use to depict our stories resonate with others, a connection that is built through perception, more precisely in the imagination. Artist Avinash Veeraraghavan’s ongoing exhibition titled Days Gone By tells us such stories of a life that is stuck in childhood, in moments of innocence.

Veeraraghavan’s exhibition, which opened on December 3, 2022, and will go on until January 16, 2023, at GALLERYSKE in Delhi, reflects on two decades of experience. Talking about the title of the show, Veeraraghavan tells Outlook, “The show contains works that span almost 18-20 years. I had a psychotic episode that kickstarted a story. It’s now almost 17 years. It is a sort of recollection and reminiscence of what I have been through. Taking a cue from Laurie Anderson’s song ‘White Lily,’ I named it Days Gone By.”

To tell his stories, Veeraraghavan didn’t limit himself to any singular form. Digital images, embroidery, laser-cuts on wood—all form part of the show. As one enters the gallery, warm lights and vibrant wallpapers accompanied by a six-hour-long playlist, with songs from genres ranging from jazz to pop that Veeraraghavan used to listen to during these years create a Benjaminian ‘aura’ that gives the sense of “its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.”

How can miniscule, gross realities create anything naturally beautiful? Veeraraghavan’s ‘Osmosis’ is a response to it. With bare eyes, from a distance, while one can see beautiful butterflies, up close what it actually is are naked human bodies in different sexual postures. “It was an effort to combine opposite forces. The natural, perceived as beautiful, and the gross, presumed to be obscene, are brought together here,” says Veeraraghavan. ‘The Strangler Fig,’ represents a root of a tree but is also actually composed of human bodies. The philosophical drive behind such creations, Veeraraghavan says, is an effort to create “one image out of many other images.”  He adds “You place the smaller images together and reconstruct. I imagine a presence that linked all of them together to make something bigger.”

The next series of works titled ‘GATECRASH’ is representative of a doll house. It reflects an inner child who through his imaginations creates what he calls “duplicates of reality”. Using old clothes and toys, it represents mundane life that extends its branches to the realm of fantasy. “Clothes here are metaphorically the person”, says Veeraraghavan.

Having traversed his childhood fantasies, one reaches the ‘Threshold,’ a series of embroidered images that he calls the summary of the rest of his works. A series of images juxtaposes the innocence of childhood with the normativity of adulthood. One of the works in this series represents urban cacophony through entangled wires in a landscape and imposes a toy on it to represent the essence of childhood. Another one is a bed with pillows, signifying the comfort of life juxtaposed with a biker that disturbs it. Says Veeraraghavan, “The bed is a safe place where you sleep and the biker represents the police whom you have to fear.”

His concerns, Veeraraghavan says, hover around childhood. “Throughout the journey, I always felt stuck in childhood. Even when I grew up, I felt that curiousness of a child,” says the artist who is now in his mid-40s.

The dreams of a child that encapsulate several of his works explicitly emerge in ‘Total Internal Recall,’ the face of a sleeping child, painted in inkjet print on textured paper. It is accompanied by a video that reflects the dreams of the child. The video is of a television screen that shows multiple images, one layered over the other. In this subconscious chaos, the constant is a robotic moth. The presence of a persistent consciousness in a mesh of multiple realities and fantasies that structure our dreams makes Veeraraghavan say, “Your mind is like a radio sometimes and it picks up signals in consciousness.”

These works are similar to his earlier show Toy Story (2009) where his imaginary narratives took a journey between his childhood memories and adulthood. However, the psychedelic experience that his 2011 show titled Crazy Jane and Jack the Journeyman is again here in the wallpaper made with the pages of a book that he made across a two decade-long journey. The collage of different images on the wall pushes one to a dizzying environment where the illusion of being present in a normative reality is dispelled and the imagination takes over our senses.

A major component in his works is the use of layers. From digital images to embroideries with glass beads, sequins and threads, Veeraraghavan presents how separate layers together produce different meanings, as if symbolically representing the shades of our lives that, in totality, shape us. “Layers are an integral part of my image construction in the digital realm. Over time, I have tried to take these soft copy layers into the physical realm by making them into laser-cut sheets of paper or veneers stacked one on top of the other to recreate an image. I like the idea of layers that imply that there is a depth to the image,” says the Chennai-born artist who, in his early days, trained under Italian designer Andrea Anastasio.

One of the finest exhibitions of his layering technique could be found in his films Hurricane and Breathing Charcoal Soaked in a Shallow Forest Stream, also the part of the show. Hurricane is composed of the images of a storm captured through the CCTV footage inside of an office building. The film uses a palimpsestic soundtrack, one layer of a girl laughing hysterically overlaid with another layer of a melancholic piano piece by Bach. “The idea of the video and audio combined is to give a feeling of something serious but yet laughable, something in turmoil but yet seemingly normal,” adds Veeraraghavan.

The second film is an assemblage of footage that Veeraraghavan took during his journey through a forest. In his words, “The video is a layered rendering of a journey through a forest.  The video is rendered in such a way that it looks almost like a charcoal drawing. There is again a double soundtrack, one of a real-life exorcism overlaid with a melancholic piece by Eric Satie. The work was made from a need to rid myself of my visions and personal ghosts.”

Through these different forms of art, Veeraraghavan tells a very personal story, one of a journey experienced in diverse ways. “The work is entirely autobiographical”, confirms Veeraraghavan. Nevertheless, it touches our chords and connects to our very personal self. “If you are personal enough, you may find some resonances.” These words of the artist give us an opportunity to look for the child within us and discover the juxtaposition of the gross and the innocent.