Avantika Bawa
Measuring Blue
Jan 24 – Feb 18
Opening event Saturday, Jan 24th, 5-8PM
Pacific Sky Exhibitions is pleased to welcome Avantika Bawa’s project Measuring Blue. Measuring Blue uses the interior architecture of the Pacific Sky Exhibitions as a prompt to generate a series of drawings on wall and paper. The width and direction of each wall is used to determine the choice of specific blue tones for each drawing and a color scheme for the lines connecting them. These formal drawings reflect space and scale, expressed through color and shape.
Avantika’s interest in transforming the act of drawing into sculptural gestures, react formally and also conceptually to architectural spaces and their history. This process emerges due, in part, to her relationship to the legacy of Minimalism and its emphasis upon reductive form, modularity and literal scale. Her approach explores the tension between wholeness and fragmentation, gravity and suspension, containment and dispersal. Industrial materials such as brick, cardboard, wood and concrete as well as common actions such as sitting, leaning, tilting and stacking become the fodder and fuel for her work.
According to Bawa, her practice “reflects the regional, cultural and geographic influences of the time and space in which I am working. I explore new territories that allows for subtlety, anti-monumentality and unexpected levels of candor. Perhaps this comes from my ability to navigate the borders between drawing and sculpture, reticence and ambition, Punjabi and English.”