Tremors

Tremors

Visakh Menon is a New York-based multidisciplinary artist who creates inimitable drawings that focus on the transmission of data-forms. He has a rigorous and highly-layered practice built upon the meditative nature of repetitive-mark making. Menon began his relatively more traditional explorations in 2014-15, after having completed his M.F.A at the Maryland Institute college of Art and having spent several years working in a professional and personal context in the digital medium. He would cross the threshold along with many of his creative preoccupations, chief among which is a fascination for the ebb and flow of natural forces as well as the immaterial energies created by technological interventions. The artist is also keenly interested in astronomical phenomenon such as cosmic radiation and the messages it may carry. He combines these through his captivating ink-and-paper drawings, manifesting them in the corporeal dimension as a highly compelling body of art. Presented here is the ‘Tremors’ series, which Menon was prompted to begin for two major reasons, the first of which was to answer the question of how to make tangible the very essence of data representation. Secondly, and with a greater emphasis on positioning this body of art within his larger oeuvre, the artist wished to distill the technique and creative process that formed the core of his general practice.

The works presented at Blueprint12 were created through a painstaking test of focus and precision, and during their development, were the artist’s attention to deviate from the sheet before him, any of these works would surely have been lost. The challenge in Tremors arises from the very nature of the materials at Menon’s disposal: The specific kind of rice paper he uses has a long tradition in Zen calligraphy, where master practitioners are able to complete an image in a single, sustained stroke. The paper is designed with the aim to maximize moisture retention, which makes it difficult to control, and therefore Menon must be equally decisive and precise, using a small selection of inks of varying diffusivity, culled through a lengthy process of trial and error, in order to create the line-work and stoppages that populate the works in this series. These, in turn, play in tandem to give viewers the impression that they are faced with a scale meant to record the incidence of some unnamed waveform. Here, the aforementioned stoppages, manifesting as blobs through which the artist creates and breaks symmetry, function as both figurative and literal markers of time, as they trace the intervals between the signal’s transmission, but in terms of their size, are also dependent upon the length of time for which he retains his position on the paper.

The artist’s work evokes visions of practitioners such as Nasreen Mohamedi, whose life’s work became an exercise in transmitting the physicality of the natural and man-made entities she encountered during India’s period of Industrial growth. Or, consider the English composer Cornelius Cardew, whose 200 page long ‘Treatise’ broke through the dogma of Western sheet music, to create a graphic score meant to be interpreted visually. While there are many artists and works to which parallels may be drawn, few encompass the sheer scope of what Menon and Blueprint12 are offering viewers: Tremors reifies the act of data representation in its broadest sense, and challenges visitors to ponder the magnitude of waveforms that surround us, drowning us in a sea of invisible information, throughout our lives, and for all time.
 

Manu Sharma