All that you leave Behind, resonates with the idea of residue as a mark of creative endeavour. The traces of human passage may stand out as sentinels of historic sites, grand memorials or commemorate acts of glory. With little intent, they also reveal the depredations of nature, the clash of communities, mass migration and the loss of civilisations.
At the same time, there is less evidence of residue which marks change not always visible. What we leave or abandon, forget or forsake can mark many acts of erasure – or commemoration. In music, writing or painting, the genesis of a work and the state of an artist in its making is not always evident in the final outcome.
While creativity itself has been described by Einstein as the ‘residue of wasted time’, art generates its own celebration of residue and recall. Photographs arrest the moment even as it passes into time; in sculpture the found object, recontextualized, gains a new valence. The archive vivifies the past with its insertion into the present. In painting the moment and its trace, and selective erasure all constitute what the artist seeks to preserve. Thus Deleuze in Anti -Oedipus suggests that the past can flow into the present, allowing for the making of new identities. “It is best to select our thoughts so that everything is left behind.”
The exhibition invites the participating artist to reflect on the idea of residue, and how it informs the image. The artists in the exhibition pose a series of questions about passage and temporalities. Thus a shadow may appear more memorable than its form, the contour of bodies as they slip into sleep or oblivion and the shadowy play of planets and their spheres of mysterious influence all appear for contemplation. The fleeting impression of waves on the sand, the mask’s game of viewing and concealment, and the images generated by psychotropic drugs all render residue as fleeting and immeasurable. What the artist offers is a narrative and allows the work to be seen in a different light.
It is in ‘leaving behind’ residue, of a past that takes form in the present and enriches the future, that the artist endures, and seeks creative definition.
Recall seldom works like memory stacks, with a ‘last in first out protocol’. Rather it is a jumble of processes, filtered selections, fragments and echoes. Ultimately residue constitutes who we are.
Gayatri Sinha