Suchitra Mattai, Osmosis: Kavi Gupta | Elizabeth St. Fl. 2

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.

 

“Osmosis relates in a way to the flexibility of storytelling. It’s about agency, pushing and pulling, ebbing and flowing, and the curiosity of probing what’s revealed, and unearthing what’s concealed.”

 

–Suchitra Mattai

Named for the scientific process of osmosis, this glistening, salt-encrusted sculpture seems to rise ominously out of the floor. The mysterious form recalls a true story of seafarers off the coast of ​​Mahabalipuram who witnessed the appearance of ruins such as this when the ocean 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. Salt is a trigger for the osmotic process, which involves the migration of water molecules from one region to another and, in a manner of speaking, is about the emergence of something and the loss of something. Mattai has both a scientific and a poetic interest in the process of osmosis, relating it to the legacy of saltwater ocean migrations that have shaped her family’s cultural and geographic heritage. To create this piece, 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. Mattai’s personal, familial, and cultural history has similarly been revealed, erased, altered, and in some ways constructed by the sea. “Osmosis relates in a way to the flexibility of storytelling,” says Mattai. “It’s about agency, pushing and pulling, ebbing and flowing, and the curiosity of probing what’s revealed, and unearthing what’s concealed.

Fire and water are symbols that appear frequently in the works of Suchitra Mattai. In this woven sculpture, a plume of colored smoke rises up through a sea blue field, emanating from a creeping edge of golden tassels and jute strands, evoking a flame devouring the woven tapestry of vintage saris from the bottom up. Mattai often uses the color blue to allude to the salt water migration of her ancestors from India to the Caribbean during an age of colonial indentured servitude. Here, the color blue alludes more to the drama and power of combustion, the creative, all-consuming energy of a flame turning blue because it is burning its hottest.

 Lasers shoot from the rainbow veil of Suchitra Mattai’s shadowy “girl beast” as she bounds through this vintage European needlepoint. The mystical, embroidered creature stands in for the “other,” the excluded, the different, the people who for whatever reason sense that they do not fit in. The girl beast’s laser sight is her special power—the acute perspective of someone observing from the margins. The Romantic Era imagery in the needlepoint harkens back to the mid-19th century, the time when European colonial powers were forced to end their brutal system of enslavement. They replaced their enslaved African workforce in places like Guyana, where Suchitra Mattai was born, with indentured servants from India . The indentured servants were promised opportunity, but their working conditions and the ultimate payoffs were far more inhospitable than they were promised, and their presence as low-paid workers made conditions even more intolerable for the recently freed African Caribbeans who were hoping to create businesses and lives. Mattai’s embroidered girl beast announces a hopeful moment of mythical transformation as the treacherous colonial facade is subverted by the resurgent power of one of its casualties.

A breaking point; a divide; a fragmentation. Fever pitch is the final work that Suchitra Mattai made in her studio in preparation for Osmosis. Like all of the works in the exhibition, this woven sculpture mobilizes the historical and aesthetic qualities of materials and processes to suggest layers of meaning. Vintage saris are woven together with feather boas, tassels and golden cords, intermingling Mattai’s feminine ancestral legacy with her personal contemporary tastes and fascinations. For Mattai, this work leads her memories to the present moment. Is the form evocative of a curtain closing, or a curtain opening? Is it an expression of the breaking point of creativity, or a breakthrough? As expressed, perhaps, by the possibilities lurking beyond the gap, Mattai says, “It evokes the act of forgetting.”