Can't take my eyes off you | Kavitha Balasingham & Shayna Fonseka
24 March - 23 April 2022
indigo+madder is pleased to present Can’t take my eyes off you, which brings together paintings and installations by Kavitha Balasingham and Shayna Fonseka. The work in the exhibition explores the languages of visuality, of seeing/unseeing, as well as our relationships to otherness.
Balasingham’s installations use the logic-defying language of cartoon physics to create portals - both physical and conceptual that lead to strange, unknown realms where a sense of safety and nostalgia coexists with the eerie. Her installations bring together the digital, with objects that have been rendered ambiguous through a manipulation of their usage and materials. These have included velvety flocked wood, play sand, candy-coloured silicone sheets, metal letters, and various anthropomorphic ceramics. Inspired by the colours and forms of the urban landscape, her work frequently employs paradoxes to unsettle and provoke - humour coexists with the grotesque; comfort with discomfort, a cartoonesque realm alongside the ‘real’, sexual desire with disgust. The installation wanna know what my dream is? to walk along the beach, holding the hand of my lover…, features a two-channel video shot in Camber Sands, which is close to Balasingham’s childhood home. Scenes of her on the beach 'looking around' with ceramic ‘popping out’ cartoon eyes, flash through screens that themselves have large, blinking animated lids. The installation plays with ideas related to voyeurism, to uncover various tropes of identity and creates a space-within-space to disrupt the somatic norm. Through her work, Balasingham is interested in exploring a sense of belonging, and the existence of otherness as an incessant presence.
Fonseka’s work is influenced by our urban and industrial landscape and explores a sense of place, displacement and placelessness. Her process involves photographing deserted city squares and found objects in the urban environment, during long walks, which she them transforms through various image layering techniques, digital studies and painting. Materials such as sand come together with acrylics and oil to create objects and textures of everyday life - the surfaces taking on the smoothness, scratches, cracks, crevices, chips, dust, roughness and abrasion of urban terrains. Fonseka’s work expresses various emotional states through the use of vivid colour, texture, warping and shadow, to create a terrain that extends beyond the physical realm, into a hidden, more personal and mysterious one. In Alberto Balsam, Aphex Twin, electrical wiring and metal structures from an underground tube station near Fonseka’s childhood home, are showered in dramatic lights. The curves of the wires and the bright, glowing structure transform into an otherworldly portal, the flattened perspective further altering the familiar. In other paintings such as sometimes I..., highly textured surfaces contrast with defined forms to produce a smoothed, distorted perspective. Patterns are duplicated & subject matter may appear familiar but displaced. The paintings reveal a profound approach to our everyday environment while investigating the tensions between our inner and outer selves.
Kavitha Balasingham (b. 1994, London) lives and works in London. She holds a BA Mixed Media Fine Art from University of Westminster (2017) and will receive her MFA from Goldsmiths London in 2022.
Recent exhibitions include Micro-Sculpture Fair, 310X Gallery, London, 2022; GHOST SHOW: the nightmare before christmas, hARTslane Gallery, London, 2021; Micro-Print Fair, 310X Gallery, London, 2021; HDL, Xxijra Hii Gallery, London, 2021; Brainchild Main Stage, Brainchild Festival, East Sussex, 2021; ‘Hot Air’ Bad Art Presents, Manor Place Warehouse, London, 2021; Mood Swigs, hARTslane Gallery, London, 2021; Wicked wicked yeah, AMP Gallery, London, 2021 and Fete Accompli, The Function Suite, London, 2020.
Shayna Fonseka (b. 1994, London) is a British artist of Sri Lankan descent. She lives and works in London. Fonseka received a BFA from Slade School of Art in 2017.
She has an upcoming residency at JOYA Air, Almería, Spain, 2022. She is currently exhibiting at A Generous Space, Hastings Contemporary, 2021-2022. Recent exhibitions and residencies include Soft Touch, London, 2021; Kurt Schwitters AIR, Merz Barn, Lake District, Cumbria, 2019; Velvet Ropes, GIFC Worldwide, BLOKK, Bergen, 2019; Velvet Ropes, GIFC Worldwide, House of Vans, London, 2019; Lounge Arrival, Infinite Multiple, Arebyte Gallery, London, 2018; Everything was beautiful & nothing hurt, Sen Mei Gallery, London, 2018; Flock Graduate Exhibition, GX Gallery, London, 2017; La Dia Blesse, 15f Micawber St, London, 2017 amongst others.
SELECTED WORKS
Short clip: wanna know what my dream is? to walk along the beach, holding the hand of my lover... , 2022 Two-channel HD video installation with play pit sand, earthenware, glaze, aluminum, and raspberry pi, 2 min 46 sec
INSTALLATION VIEWS
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