Coiled to strike
The many asymmetric objects in a cabinet at the JDA Perera Gallery are vaguely menacing, yet strangely captivating. They can look like anything depending which angle and perception you look at them from. There’s one muddy brown form that looks like a severed limb, there’s another that looks slightly foetal, there’s yet another that looks like a dormant alien life form. When we saw Mahen Perera’s work at the Colombo Art Biennale we were definitely curious. Here was art that you could observe for hours and still not tire of…art that morphed into familiar objects right before your eyes.
When we meet him a week later he is as eloquent as his work. “It’s not political,” hAdd Newe warns, before we can launch into a tirade of questions on the very subject. We resume gazing at his masterpiece; working with what the artist community likes to call ‘found objects’ (scrap material to you and me) Mahen creates objects of great mystery and compulsion. It’s difficult to describe the sense of almost morbid curiosity that draws you to these pieces-the rest of the gallery is festooned with bright, colourful works by other artists yet you’re inexplicably drawn to the lone cabinet in the middle of the hall. Your first reaction will be as good as anyone else’s-there are some who have likened certain pieces to a foetus or even, memorably, a pile of excrement. Looking closer through the glass walls (Mahen is a little miffed that he couldn’t display them as he wanted on a flat surface but he acknowledges that the cabinet adds to the mystery and historical allure of his work), you notice the old, dusty scrap pieces of wood the objects are balanced on, the metal of the rusty nail. Then it dawns on you, this bizarre compulsion that drew you to the artist’s work in the first place-Mahen’s creations pulsate with an intense aura of tension. The objects seem coiled, ready to strike.
“There’s a certain sadomasochistic quality to them,” he points out. These objects are actually made from his clothes; wrapped, sewn and painted to make strangely formed objects of architectural dystopia. “I had just returned from Singapore and come to the conclusion that I had way too many clothes,” he laughs. Want not, waste not so “I started wrapping them up and then they started taking shape.” It took him months to get them up and standing tall; he would sit down every day with an industrial-strength needle and thread and sew till his fingers ached or bled-or both. “It was very therapeutic but stressful at the same time,” he reveals.
Mahen is interested in space, and the occupation of it. “Sometimes you can tell the body language of a certain space, and that fascinates me.” He finds inspiration in what he does not necessarily understand. The known is predictable-the unknown, like his work, is much more interesting. The psychological tension present within his work is testament to this-it’s almost as if the objects are daring us to reach out and unfold the mysteries within. The artist is probably very glad for his glass cabinet now; it prevents overzealous audiences from tampering with his hard work! But you get the sense Mahen wouldn’t really mind. “We’ve lost that human connection where we feel with each other, haven’t we?” he laments. “I feel like art is one of the few things that can bring that back.”
He doesn’t quite believe in art for the sake of social commentary alone. “That commentary ends at a certain level,” he tells us. He’s qualified enough to make such a statement-the artist was trained in Multi-Disciplinary Design at the National Design Centre in Colombo before going on to pursue a BA in Fine Arts with the Lasalle College of Singapore. This was in affiliation with the Open University of UK where he was awarded a First Class Honours, together with a prestigious Winston Oh Travel Award in 2007 which allowed him to take a month long residency in Prague. His work has been exhibited both locally and internationally. Art can be for the sake of art you know, he tells us. “You don’t always need to know exactly what it means, how it translates.”
Mahen gained prominence some time back for his work with canvases that were painted and then washed…yes, washed. “It didn’t start off that way,” he explains. “I was trying to paint something and it wasn’t turning out the way I wanted it to. And I was bored-so bored that I went into the loo and ran the canvas under the tap so I could start over.” What emerged from the canvass while it was held under a running tap stopped the artist in his tracks. “It was this beautiful, multi-faceted thing of beauty,” he says, still in wonderment. It was at this point in his career that he began questioning the possibility of transforming something pictorial into an object. Just like the viewing process required to enjoy his work, Mahen’s artistic journey must also constantly evolve. He plans to take his work for CAB and make it into something even larger; and potentially even more impressive.