Cricket on canvas
With the beginning of IPL 6, the entire mediaitic space: print, audio and visual is beginning to be usurped by this form of cricket. Mukesh Sharma, an artist has used the hype media around this new kind of cricketing format; fuelled by advertising, social media and changing viewership where everything is reduced to bytes to create his artworks.
Mukesh re-creates the IPL, the epitome of digital age sports through installation sculpture and digigraphy.
The common factor in all these works is the use of the circular sports arena that is participatory and predatory at the same time, with the players and the action becoming consumable products. The other important element is the use of keyboards, the ubiquitous object that defines digital technology. Keys are evocative of the new mediatic world controlled by computers, phones and other gadgets, mediating not only the public but also the private sphere. Of course, like the virtual world even the keys are ephemeral and illusory.
In a work Hello Hunny Bunny, displayed at the art fair, Mukesh combined the omnipresent in your face world of advertising, cell phones and cricket, placing a cell phone in the centre instead of a cricket pitch. In a digital print on archival paper, one can see a circular, concentric form, created by the manipulation of photographs of thousands of large and small keys, black and white keys in Photoshop programme.
The installation, IPL, which is made of actual keys, is put together in a circular formation with a painting of a stadium and with spectator stands in the background. The ground is made with black, the pitch with white and fielding positions with red keys. The work is elaborately put together, creating a graded effect. The material for it came from dissecting numerous and a variety of keyboards, traditional and multimedia, junked and new, each adding a new aspect to the whole.
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