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In-Between Matter and Materiality curated by Dumith Kulasekara

In-Between Matter and Materiality

curatorial note

















In-Between Matter and Materiality is an exhibition of a new body of work created by the students at the final level in the department of painting. The exhibition highlights a group of young artists’ approaches to experimentation with matter and materiality in their studio practice. The studio practice has allowed them to find the methodologies and possibilities for the evolution of their works. The body of work results from the process evolved from the act of probing, questioning, responding, situating, constructing and deconstructing different matters and materials encountered by these young artists. This collection of work displayed on the three floors in the JDA Perera Gallery implies a character of visual poetry present in every work and its relationship to the whole body of work. Such intimacy among the works evokes a sense of order and disorder, and differences and repetitions in the visual language developed by each artist. The visual poetry of manipulating materials found in different contexts; natural environment, everyday life, and the readymade, suggests the possibilities of embodying different matters in the context of contemporary art. Exploration of the materials and matters becomes a coexisting phenomenon in every artist’s practice in this group. They look at different social-personal contexts by exploring the concepts, keywords, and materials while discovering their own directions. The artists in this group; fifteen female and two male artists bring a range of keywords; body, gender, sexuality, identity, fantasy, desire, fear, violence, pleasure, vulnerability, consumerism, economy, nationality, justice, equality, inequality, environment, nature, herbal medicine, power, domesticity and psychic status into the visual forms. They employ the multidisciplinary and everyday practice of art; painting, sculpture, photographs taken from everyday devices such as mobile phones, video-sounds art, installations, architectural structures, objects, textiles, readymade, and documented performances to discuss the comprehensive social-personal spaces and matters that we all encounter in our lives. In this sense, the exhibition of “In-Between Matter and Materiality” becomes a visual manifestation of the social-personal consciousness of the young artists about the time that we all have been living through. The exhibition also suggests a sort of freedom that the young artists looking for within the socio-personal context and in the language of visual arts in the contemporary context.

Dumith Kulasekara
Curator/Senior Lecturer  
/ Course coordinator of Creative Painting Studio (Level 4)
22 January 2023

Featured Artists: 

Ashan Isuranga Perera, Sachithra Dananjani, Umesha Ishari, Dumindu Illangasinghe, Nayani Chathumali, Nadeshani Welagedara, Nugera Lakmali, Eranga Harshana, Uppeka Wijesundara, Saumya Nawarathna, Ishara Sandamali, Shashikala Chaturangi, Amasha Perera, Kalani Vileshika, Tharuka Peiris, Ruwanthi Ranaweera, Anushka Rathnayaka. 

This exhibition consists of the works of the final-year students of the Department of Painting, Faculty of Visual Arts, UVPA. The exhibition was organised by the Department of Painting and was held at JDA Perera Gallery, Horton Place, Colombo 07, Sri Lanka

 

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