THE VESSEL WITH TWO MOUTHS
May 12th - June 17th 2023, Patel Brown Gallery, Toronto
From the Patel Brown Gallery website:
The Vessel with Two Mouths places Perera within a research methodology that investigates her fascination with the unseen. The exhibition displays a non-linear progression of her practice that embodies the origins of her ancestry and linkages to Sri Lankan cultural and spiritual traditions.
Influenced by a month-long residency in her home country of Sri Lanka with her daughter, this new body of work represents the artist’s longing for an ancestral home, and renegotiates her diasporic relationship to her heritage. Perera's desire to build a practice that emerges from the earth and its underbelly produces new material forms, which invite us to revisit our relationships to the traditions that inform our lives and ancestries. The Vessel with Two Mouths collapses a linear progression of time, placing Perera in a position of divine omniscience in relation to her practice that has typically illustrated an imagined future. Here, instead, she looks to the past’s stain upon the present to better understand and establish the canon of the origins of not only her practice, but herself.
-Rajni Perera and Sayem Khan
Install shot | The Vessel with Two Mouths | Patel Brown Gallery, Toronto
Detail | Only Enough Air for Myself | Foam, polymer clay, real and fake pearls, glass and stone beads | 6’4” X 5.5’ X 5'.5’ approx
Our Math as Old as Time | Nylon Horsehair, Acryl-Gouache, polymer clay, glass, plastic and stone beads, brass, ikkat cotton weft |
The Dream | Nylon horsehair, airbrush paint, Acryl-gouache, polymer clay, pearls, cotton |
Install shot | Patel Brown Gallery, Toronto
Kevuni’s Curse | Nylon horsehair, Acryl-Gouache, chalk, charcoal, fixative |
Droid (study) | Nylon Horsehair, charcoal, pearls |
Fountain 1 | Foam, Winterstone, concrete patina, water pump, steel, plastic (fountain) interior latex paint (wall painting) |
Various small sculpture | Polymer Clay, brass objects, coconut shell | various sizes (12” X 12” X 12”)