Disruptions
Reddy’s practice resides within an ‘active space’ of making where process meets material. Within this site of making, the experience of becoming and being is nurtured in its purest form. Here, within a seemingly infinite fantasy exists that within which possibility and opportunity do not necessarily have a beginning or an end. Reddy aims to access a beyond, a virtual fold, a new plane of life, perpetually escaping into a world anew. Disruptions (2021) manifests through material-site and non-site contingencies, which concern potential matter and incidental happenings. The work addresses the realm of possibility found within discarded remnants of everyday encounters by engaging with material processes, orchestrated situations, and disrupted conditions of the real.
​
Upon entering site-specific events, these materials situate within growing mediums fostered by temperamental occurrences within seashores, bodies of sand, rocks, drains, ponds, and concrete earths. As the materials are revealed within their immediate environment, their coherent body is shaped by peculiar progressions and entropic implications of their process. Over the duration of four months, residual fabrics, found towels, gradual plastic skins, and latex remnants materialize as vestiges, disseminating and transmuting, belonging to a site they were once introduced to. Prevailing as a living entity, the fabric remains alive, existing as a remnant while simultaneously being an active material. In this respect, the vestiges become a material imprint and permanent trace of time.
​
Time is warped as it enters into a virtual fold, bound by site and inhabited within material conditions. Time is echoed by the tides coming in and the sand washing away, it is contained by site-specific events such as residual fabric floating at shore and it is interrupted by the unfolding contingencies imposed by fallen rocks, swimming ducks and the shadows behind the trees. The tendency of time becomes an indeterminate measure of how material-site encounters operate at different intensities, constantly materializing and dematerializing into the histories of each works becoming and being. Central to the duration of the work it becomes, both, a material in itself and an extension of life. In this sense, while the experience of becoming is being constructed, the conditions in which they emerge are also constantly redefined. All the while, cosmic ambitions are dissolved into reality, as the work's own being becomes nothing other than itself.
Alisha Ekta Reddy.
BVA. November 2021.
The Unbecoming
“Constructing an abstract machine is to construct construction itself. The abstract machine is the vital mechanism of a world always emerging anew, it is the mechanism of creation operating at the level of the real. Here, a new world opens up, a living world in which nothing is given except creation. To open a world, to construct a new type of reality, this is the ontological foundation of the world--of this world and of all the others-on an abstract machine guiding its becoming. The abstract machine creates a new reality, constructs new ways of being, but although inseparable from this innovation of existence, it has no being. The abstract machine is the entirely immanent condition of the new, and thereby receives its Nietzschean definition: its being is becoming.”
​
-Excerpt from Art As Abstract Machine : Ontology and Aesthetics in Deleuze and Guattari.
​
My work resides within an ‘active space’ of making where process meets material. By obliterating representation, it explores the realm of fantasy in relation to the experience of becoming. It is, instead, an abstract machine. Within the construction site of making, this abstract machine aims to capture fantasy within the real, where creating creation and constructing construction is nurtured in its purest form. Here, a fantasy resides within a sort of infinity, where possibility and opportunity does not necessarily have a beginning or an end. Thus, one is able to escape, beyond, into a new plane of life.
​
As an entropy of abjection unravels along the floor of a horizontal plane of reality, the very nature of the work's tonal aesthetic is realised through ‘material maturity.’ This encompasses a variety of raw, natural, earthy, and disregarded materials such as: plastics, paper, tissues, dirt, dust, sand, plaster, flour, rice, metal rods, rags, towels, fabrics, clay, latex, buckets, concrete, water, cardboard, and rocks. Perhaps, this speaks to the adult corruption at the hands of the artist. In time, the entropy of materials form together much like fragments of a dream, into a series of episodes which intertwine with one another, creating both unfamiliar and foreign relationships into the unknown.
​
As the materials begin to unfold in relation to other materials, it becomes apparent that while there is an experience of becoming, there simultaneously, is an experience of unbecoming. That while something is being created from the vantage of life, it is also being created on the brink of death. As it gasps for its last breath, its body and flesh degrade, decay, and deteriorate being reborn again into something anew. After all, there is no creation without destruction. On one hand the materials are liberated, on the other they are being consumed. In this sense, while the experience of becoming is being constructed, conditions are also being redefined. All the while, cosmic ambitions are dissolved into reality, as the work's own being becomes nothing other than itself.
​
“And I join in my slime, my excrement, my madness, my ecstasy to the great circuit which flows through the subterranean vaults of the flesh. All this unbidden, unwanted, drunken vomit will flow on endlessly through the minds of those to come in the inexhaustible vessel that contains the history of the race. Side by side with the human race there runs another race of beings, the inhuman ones, the race of artists who, goaded by unknown impulses, take the lifeless mass of humanity and by the fever and ferment with which they imbue it turn this soggy dough into bread and the bread into wine and the wine into song. Out of the dead compost and inert slag they breed a song that contamines.”
- Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer
Excerpt from “Art As Abstract Machine : Ontology and Aesthetics in Deleuze and Guattari.”
A durational and temporal aspect of time becomes central to the life and death within the very being of the work. The water prevails, becoming an extension of life, existing as a material in itself. Inhabiting the inside of plastic bags to leaking out of towels, it becomes a life source which nurtures the latex, unfired clay, dirt and sand. In this sense, the nourishing of materials introduces a performative and ritualistic aspect which emerges within the mode of making of the work. As the water evaporates, materials dry up until more water is poured over the materials in the same continuous pattern.
​
While fantasy and reality are simply opposite ends of the same life experience, there exists a place where pockets of fantasy make their way into reality. However fleeting that moment may be, it is in this place where one becomes with the world, instead of just looking at the world. Fantasy is utopia as much as it is dystopia; mortal as much as it is immortal; beautiful as much as it is strange; known as much as it is unknown; familiar as much as it is unfamiliar. Above all else, fantasy is as much creation as it is destruction. The abstract machine offers an escape into an infinity; into a world anew.
BVA. August 2021.
Alisha Ekta Reddy.