Billboard art comes of age
PRIYADARSSHINI SHARMA
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Donald Fels is trading on his billboards to make the world think about the effects of globalisation.
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Photo: Mahesh Harilal
Art of Commerce: Donald Fels along with his co-workers at Godown Studio in Kochi.
Fulbright scholar Donald Fels, who hails from the United States (U.S.), along with local billboard painters in Kochi, is putting together billboards based on trade issues that will be displayed at Tacoma Art Museum, Seattle.
His billboards market ideas, thoughts and inferences reached after three years of research on global trade. Fels' `West in the East' exhibition, which will travel across the world and then be exhibited later this year in Seattle, begins on a seashore in Kerala.
"When Vasco da Gama came to India, 500 years ago, it marked the beginning of global trade," believes Fels. He has been working in Kochi for the last six months, studying and painting the fallout of that historic sea voyage and the way it influenced the lives of people. "Many traders had come to Kerala but Da gama was sent by his king. I am not an economist, I am interested in how trade enabled ideas to move around the globe. And I don't see things in black or white. As an artiste I am interested in what trade meant then and what it means now."
And so his subjects encapsulate the 500 years of trade in vivid metal hoardings and in colours typical of the sub-continent.
"I begin of course with Da Gama, but move to local flora and fauna, and some works of Dr. Garcia D' Orta's books on Indian medicinal plants. I connect the past to the present through my paintings. The whole issue of patenting flora and fauna can be traced to unintentional bio piracy that trade brought about. Using history, the hoardings connect backwards and forwards."
And as Don Fels moves back and forth in time through billboard art, his research takes him to fundamentals.
"You know what was the beginning of museums?" he asks. The `cabinet of curiosities,' an interesting work explains that. " In the beginning the curios taken from India were stored in wooden cabinets to adorn rich households in Europe but later the cabinets proved insufficient, as the collection grew bigger. Finally a museum had to house the objects of art. But it all began here."
Another work titled `Ships carry ideas' emphasises Don Fels' own interpretation that trade was inherently a trading of ideas and hence the basis of globalisation. History and its economic fallout find expression in his works.
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