If art exhibitions were  all about sensitive eyes and visual treats, the art exhibition put up by the students of Stella Maris College at the Lalit Kala Akademi recently would have you racking your brains for newer definitions. From aromatic rooms to magnetic attachable plaster of Paris lips and video installations, the art exhibition was hardly an acrylic and oil affair.

The art installation of Eun Young featured diverse subjects such as piping hot samosas before a gigantic photograph of men sitting before a food stall on the Marina beach.

Madhini, another student who had put up her exhibition, had a set of paintings with the recurring motif of lips. Along with a few of her paintings were magnetic lips, which could be detached from the paintings and replaced by the viewers according to their choice on the painting. The artist had tried to bring out her experience with stammering and the silence that people with it have to put up with.

Taking it to the personal level, some had paraphernalia such as childhood photographs and gifts from friends incorporated with the art work to showcase their experience. Christima Shaju, herself a myopic, in her painting All that We See had used a canvas with Braille dots and others with blurred and darkened images to bring out the perceptions of people with different kinds of disabilities of the eye.

“Students today are much more open to experimenting, in terms of technique and the plurality of approach. Things like installations, which are very new to the international and even more to the Indian art scene have already caught on in a big way,” said Lakshmi Priya, assistant professor, Department of Fine Arts at Stella Maris College.

Meanwhile, a large part of the exhibition was centered around life in Chennai, Carnatic music and classical and folk dances to autorickshaws.

Nature, spirituality, identity and deprivation were some of the other major themes at the exhibition.

source: http://www.newindianexpress.com / The New Indian Express / Home> Cities> Chennai / by Express News Service – Chennai / April 17th, 2014