Arts Illustrated - October - November 2017

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With this issue we take on these upside down, topsy-turvy worlds of shifting, blurring
lines, of what it means to be ‘sane’ and ‘insane’, and where the two meet to create unexpected or dystopian realities. We look at art and artists who are constantly straddling the twin worlds, sometimes with dangerous abandon and sometimes with quiet power, but always with a sense of urgency, of alertness and of acute consciousness of the times we live in and the pathways they create.

On the cover, artist Avinash Veeraraghavan presents an intense and intimate context that for all intents and purposes shatters our perceived understanding sanity. ‘One of the fundamental metaphysical elements in my journey was the mirror. And one very critical sequence from a popular film structured everything that I was to go through eventually. This is the final fight sequence in the film Enter the Dragon between Bruce Lee and the antagonist. This game of cat and mouse inside a hall of mirrors succinctly sums up much of what I imagined I was living through. It was the perception of a powerful and scathing presence that constantly reflected my own ugly image back to me and broke one self-image after the other in the process. This is one of the most intense autobiographical references and one that has been on my mind for a very long time. For this cover, I found the perfect context in which to articulate this image. Rather than one print alone, which is how many of my pieces are reproduced, it is important to me that this is a cover and will therefore be reproduced in quantity, a metaphor for a hall of mirrors of its own’, he explained