While my personal taste in art is very much rooted in the figurative, the work of Aakash Nihalani is exciting me more than most these days. His street and gallery installations are not only aesthetically and conceptually powerful – their sophistication is growing at an almost startlingly rapid pace.
It is evident that Aakash has the ability to develop and adapt his work into countless creative avenues. For now, however, his work can be viewed in a three person group show at Arario Gallery, New York. What he has produced for this show is really quite fantastic. Here are some images of the installation.
It is interesting to read some of Aakash’s thoughts behind the work.
“Since the show was titled Paraphrase, I took the opportunity to get into some text, tapeography. I did ubiquitous words that we all encounter in our daily travels, especially as a New Yorker, but I wanted my paraphrase of the words to be aesthetically ‘better’ than their original. So the words pull, push, and exit are all written out in tape, as well as simultaneously being shown ‘acted’ out, or about to be (as in the exit piece). They were all a little bigger than human scale so as to more objectify their viewer rather than the usual other way around. I think these installations were particularly successful because they stayed true to the site specific nature of the work that got me the show in the first place (i.e. using the gallery’s door hinge to complete some of my lines), but also took on new levels of content in the figuration of the letters, and new concepts/processes of using the tape to express qualities like peeling and falling.”
These photos came from Aakash.
Elisa x