Avantika Bawa

Get to know SqW:Lab 2021 fellows – today we speak to artist Avantika Bawa

Where can you be found?

In the ether. Or Portland, OR, USA. 😉

Tell us about a creative action you have taken this week.

I made chicken hearts using mostly intuition to guide my cooking approach and spices used. The dish was very good (sorry to eww the vegetarians in the group!).

What does ‘home’ mean to you? 

Mere Bhaarat Mahan! But I do love Portland too. 🙂

What was the last thing you drew?

A pattern with several horizontal and vertical lines. A few diagonals too.

Tell us about 2 of your most subtle influences.

Walking without my phone or any technology. Brunelleschi’s David and the Jantar Mantar, New Delhi, India. That’s three, sorry!

Please share your thoughts / a few words about your expectations of the project. 

Born of pandemic challenges and creative necessity, I collaborated remotely with my colleague, in the summer of 2020 to 3-D print a series of mini scaffolds in plastic. These miniatures, an extension of The Scaffold Series (an ongoing project that began in 2021) have allowed me to create temporary installations in a short time, and in the most bizarre locations despite the pandemic. The temporary mini-installations now exists only as photographs.

While the plastic version worked well as models for photographs (since the viewer cannot experience the texture), the next logical step was to print them in metal to have an object that was more substantial and sculptural. And so I worked with a company in New York City to test possibilities. The outcome was successful & resulted in a show, “Constructing Darkness” that was well reviewed in several reputable publications.

For my work in the “Show Windows Project”, I intend to create an another iteration of the “Scaffolds Series”. By exploring new terrain (a shop window in this case), and different ways of configuring these mini scaffolds, I will in essence highlight the endless possibilities of a single structure by pushing permutations and combinations of color, form and scale in relation to location.

I would ideally like to pair up with an architect who I can collaborate with remotely to make this installation successful. For the collaborating architect, it would be, I hope akin to playing with architectural models!

Interestingly, the very first iteration of “The Scaffold Series” took place at Gallery Maskara, Mumbai, India, for the show titled, “Another Documentation”, 2012. It would be interesting to bring that project back to the area, almost ten years later.