As part of the opening reception for Suchitra Mattai's Osmosis at Kavi Gupta | Elizabeth St. Fl. 2, join the artist and Lauren Haynes, Director of Curatorial Affairs and Programs at the Queens Museum, for a walkthrough of the exhibition.
Kavi Gupta presents Osmosis, a solo exhibition of new multi-media works by Indo-Caribbean American artist Suchitra Mattai.
Thinking about the saltwater ocean migrations that have shaped her family’s cultural and geographic heritage, Mattai has both a scientific and a poetic interest in the process of osmosis, which involves the migration of water molecules from one region to another. Salt is a trigger for the osmotic process, which, in a manner of speaking, is about the emergence of something and the loss of something.
To create the works in Osmosis Mattai employed salt as both a sculptural medium and a chemical instigator of aesthetic transformation. The material empowers Mattai’s aesthetic expressions of emergence and loss as they relate to the layering of new stories and cultural traditions atop those that already exist.
Anchoring the exhibition is a large-scale salt sculpture depicting a tilted temple ruin, seemingly emerging from underground. The glistening, encrusted form recalls the story of seafarers off the coast of Mahabalipuram who witnessed the appearance of such ruins when the waters temporarily receded from shore prior to a tsunami. When the sea rushed back in, the ruins disappeared. They exist now only in the seafarers’ memories, and in folklore.
Mattai’s personal, familial, and cultural history has similarly been revealed, erased, altered, and in some ways constructed by the sea. Her artworks critically, and often joyfully, reflect upon this complex past by incorporating significant family heirlooms such as her mother’s vintage saris and her grandmother’s prayer Dupatta. Simultaneously, the works push her family’s story forward by incorporating materials of personal significance to Mattai’s American experience, such as feather boas, shattered glass from her broken studio window, and found objects recovered from second hand stores.
Image: Suchitra Mattai, Osmosis, 2022. Salt, fabric, cords, wood. Dimensions variable.
