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Sosa Joseph’s solo at Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke

‘The Common,’ solo show by Sosa Joseph will open at Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke on October 6, 2009. The show, Sosa Joseph’s Bombay debut, comprises oils on canvas, water colours, pastels and inks on paper.

Embodying images drawn from the world around her – mainly the graphic experience of coastal living in Kerala – Sosa Joseph has, like many other artists through history, investigated the emotional and spatial qualities of her environment and that of her personal life, blurring the boundaries between the two in works that have a comprehensive visual impact.

In both her small and large format paintings we confront the artist’s world of reality crossed with fantasy: nature, often aqueous, spills over with the catch of the day stacked high in nets and baskets, crabs and shrimps still scuttling for shelter, even as some brand of eerie marine life disports itself through waving strands of seaweed across the ocean floor. The world above the waterline adds to the already established dream-like sense of dislocation as disembodied hands fly dragonflies as if they were paper kites, or the truncated image a cat or a frog, already half out of the frame, adds a zap to an unexpected disappearing act.

There is also this frequent withdrawal into domestic space with representations of pots and pans and still-life arrangements of cutlery, crockery, flowers and fruit. The prickly jackfruit is a recurring image, sometimes hacked open with a knife, its fleshy innards revealed. Hinting at the symbolic possibilities of the fertile, the sensual and the violent co-existing in some kind of duplicitous tandem, the image could be construed as a reflection of the female experience. In the process, images like these – some with more subtle inflections – echo this artist’s preoccupation with truth. “One has to be truthful to oneself and to anything and everything around,” says Joseph, responding reflexively to the politics of the local and the topical
 
Based in Kochi, Kerala, Sosa Joseph was born in 1971. She holds a Diploma in Painting from Ravi Varma College of Fine Arts, Mavelikkara and a Post Graduate Diploma in Painting from M. S. University, Baroda. She has held a solo exhibition, ‘Tenacity of the Moon’ at Kashi Art Gallery, Kochi (2005). Her work has been included in group exhibitions at Schneider Museum, Oregon, USA (2006), Triva Contemporary Art Gallery, Trivandrum (2007) and Kashi Art Gallery, Kochi (2007).

The show will continue till November 12, 2009 at Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke, 2 Sunny House, 16/18 Mereweather Road, Behind Taj Mahal Hotel, Colaba, Mumbai-1.

- From A Correspondent.