Prashant Pandey reawakens perception of everyday life by defying conventional logic when it comes to ways of seeing discarded objects. Through his use of found, recycled and reclaimed material like sweet lime bagasse, marble blast-stones and chunks of road tar, Pandey uses by-products of human activity in innovative ways, interrupting the utilitarian cycle of everyday life.
This distortion of form slows down the act of perception between the audience and the object. In this manner, his work serves the poetic function of promoting seeing, as opposed to recognizing something that is already familiar and known.
Pandey believes that a closer scrutiny of what we throw away gives us a deeper understanding of ourselves, maintaining that judging the objects we discard as useless is an inherently unstable affair. In Yellow the residue of the sweet lime that is discarded is brought back to life in the form of a densely layered cube infused with sculptural poetry.
If this new body of work encourages one to trash anything, it is a conventional way of seeing. Love, a white heart made from marble blast-stones opens up the definition of this emotion to include the cracks, the longing, the frustration, the struggles, all elements that ultimately fuse together to give love its shape and character.
Although Pandey’s medium is constantly shifting, his basic concern remains the same – a critical commentary on modern society. Through his delicate sculpture Missed, he creates a turtle out of crumpled, burnt and drawn-upon pieces of paper, using the turtle as trope that invites us to think about how the life of animals - for skin and for fashion - is being as easily discarded as the paper on which his work is created.
If you let the work speak to you, it will have an abundance to say. For starters, it questions the meaning of “shelf life” through the use of material that is long past its supposed use-by date, inviting you to witness a resurrection of all that is forgotten and obscure.
-Sonia Nazareth
