Religious Elegance
Madhvee Deb’s solo exhibition opened as part of George Town Festival this past weekend at the charming and trendy Ome by Spacebar Coffee on Lorong Toh Aka. Featuring 10 large photographs and also sculptures and a video, the intent is to focus the mind on what happens to the vast number of digital photos taken that are then rejected, forgotten or deleted.
Time Never Stood Still
Madhvee decided to take a second look at these rejected images and find a way to turn them into something beautiful, by digitally layering multiple images of the same scene into one photograph. The exhibition is the result of her analysing how people now need smartphones to create memories, most notably through the selfie culture, and questioning how real these memories are when the photos have been taken with the intent of sharing them on social media. By using her own store of photos rejected for technical or compositional issues, she gives a new lease of life to at least a small part of this “digital waste”, re-evaluating images she had taken without thought and the valuable memories they inherently contain.
The Spaces Between Them
To further explore photographic intent, and to break from the two-dimensional aspect of the photograph, other rejected photo prints have been used to create the “Small Sculptures“, playfully “wasting” a photograph by turning it into something else. Lastly, Madhvee has made a short video, “The F-art of Social Media,” with the aim of replicating the condition of being lost in the superficial, overloaded realm of social media information. This, like the rest of the exhibition, is aimed to jolt the viewer into the same realisation she has made: keep control over social media usage and make memories that you will hold dear, especially when taking a photograph.
Her exhibition is on until September 2nd on the First Floor of Ome by Spacebar Coffee, at 1, Lorong Toh Aka. Opening hours are 10am to 6pm daily except Thursdays. For more information on this exhibition click here and to find out more about the artist click here.