To every artist, his each art piece is special but he makes his identity in the world with his greatest masterpieces that challenge the power of imagination of the audience. One such emerging Indian artist is Nandan Ghiya, faculty at Pearl Academy Jaipur, who believes that any arrangement of form and space defines individual, cultural, geographic or economic identities.
Through his artworks under his signature ‘deFacebook Project’, Nandan has gone on to develop his unique point of view on contemporary societies and human relationships thereby making his work an interesting interface between the past and the present where faces, genres and pixels mix and match in a series of vintage print collages.
Recently, Nandan’s work was published in ‘Photography and Inherited History of India‘, a book by San Jose Museum of Art in Association with University of California Press. This book accompanies the exhibition of the same name organized collaboratively by San Jose Museum of Art California and Ulrich Museum of Art, Wichita State University, Kansas on the view in San Jose from February 5 through August 2, 2015 and in Wichita from September 12 through December 12, 2015.
For his project, Nandan took inspiration from the nearly bygone tradition of studio photography, he invited participants to pose against a constructed space which was created using pixelated vinyl-print cut-outs of photography studio objects like a chair, a flower bouquet on a stool, a backdrop or a carpet. Photo documentation is taken, then manipulated on a computer and printed with an instant photo-printer.
Nandan’s tryst with the art is not new. Apart from being born and brought up in Jaipur, he comes from a family of art dealers and his earliest memories of growing up was surrounded by pictures of ancestors, gurus, and political heroes hanging on the walls of his ancestral home. His experimental art practice challenges our perception of the status-quo and thus presents a new perspective of the young generation from a country with long-standing histories and cultures within a fast globalizing world.
