avoid romanticizing the landscape:
an immersive installation by illesha Khandelwal

opening reception: friday, march 23rd , 7-9pm
open gallery hours: saturday & sunday, 24th – 25th march noon-6pm

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illesha Khandelwal (b. 1995, Mumbai, India) lives and works between Queens, NY and Mumbai, India. Her work suggests a kind of psychology of geography – an unfixed landscape that you alter by your very presence. Is experiencing someone’s memory of a place the same as physically being there? Which is more real? She is interested in the way the absence of a place becomes a presence, and suggesting what this may look like in the multiverse. At a time of global uncertainty, a flood of heartache: she fabricates a phenomenological world, constantly in flux. The work urges you to surrender your senses to the unknowable, build an intimacy with distant places, and develop a tangible relationship with the photograph.

there is a certain consciousness, a momentous and fragmented state of being, which the landscape rouses. this awareness is concentrated in intensely sensuous junctures. it allows an unprecedented, and highly personal engagement with the individual life-world. at times it seeps so far into our fissures that we fracture. this breakage uncovers naïve strata below, and so the process continues.

Fabric, paper, clay and text take on the appearance of floating in an installation of threads. This is a world of fictional objects and memories, entangled with the factual, blurring the separations between what is experienced and what is imagined. The objects are built like thoughts in their fluidity and fickleness. The materials breathe, they move, and your very presence changes them.

You will be pulled into a murky remembrance; perhaps some dusty flashback of a lover long gone, or a lingering dream of your bare feet sunk in sand. You have entered a world where rock is soft, and vulnerability is strength. The land is abraded, it reforms. So do I. The slow fragmentation, the heartbreak, it is the same. We fall apart, we come together.

@illesha
www.illesha.com
#illeshakstudio #illeshakinflux