Actress Lekha Washington’s first solo art exhibition, titled The Collective Noun or A Pound of Flesh and Suchlike, is being held at Mumbai’s Sakshi Art Gallery. Washington is an accomplished designer and sculptor, who started sculpting with rolls of atta when she was just eight years old. She held her first exhibition when she was 18, at the Lalit Kala Akademi in Chennai. A graduate of the National Institute of Design, Washington owns a product-design company, Ajji, that manufactures and sells the products that she designs.
The Collective Noun or A Pound of Flesh and Suchlike is a set of installations, mixed media work and videos that explores “our relationship with ourselves, our bodies and our worlds”. The exhibition began on February 25 and will go on till March 31. The exhibition showcases ten of Washington’s highly abstract experiential artworks.
Read: ART, LIFE AND FILTERED WATER: THE LEKHA WASHINGTON INTERVIEW
“I consider this exhibition my first formal introduction to the field of art. Though I have been an artist all my life, I have never really done a full-fledged solo exhibition like this one,” says Lekha, “And it’s going well. I made really big pieces this time.” The biggest piece in the exhibition is an installation titled A Dervish Of Tornadoes. It is a replication of a tornado, made of soft cloth.
Lekha is gearing up to hold another solo exhibition in Chennai this month. She also plans to do a lot of public art in the future: on the streets of Mumbai and outside the country. She created five huge helium ‘Moon balloons in the sky’ pieces for the last Kochi Art Biennale. Now, she is working on a few projects which will be showcased on the streets of South Mumbai’s Colaba. According to Lekha, “Art isn’t an elitist thing. It is something for everyone. I want to do significant pieces outside gallery spaces.”
Inside Image Courtesy: Sakshi Art Gallery Facebook Page
