OPENING: Anjali Srinivasan’s meditation on mirrored surfaces debuts at Heller Gallery this evening

Taking inspiration from mirrored palaces, and houseware markets of her native India, Anjali Srinivasan explores the effects of multi-planar mirrored surfaces in her new installation at Heller Gallery in New York City. photo: anjali Srinivasan

This evening, Anjali Srinivasan (BFA, Alfred, 2002; MFA, RISD, 2007) will debut her newest work, Of Clocks and Clouds (2013), a network of tetrahedrons in stainless steel and blown, mirrored glass that create a contemplative array of reflected surfaces. These complex mirrored patterns, when made from stainless steel, result in a light reflection that is slightly more diffused than mirrored glass, but reference visions of housewares on display in markets in Srinivasan’s native India. They will be showing at New York City’s Heller Gallery, which has been featuring the work of a new generation of artists using glass such as Amber Cowan.

Srinivasan draws a connection between the overfull shops brimming with stainless steel vessels in Chennai, India, and the lost mirrored palaces known as “Sheesh Mahals,” which featured dazzling mirrored paneling on walls and ceilings that were interlocking shapes. As she writes in a prepared statement: “Each mirrored shard is a lens that converts the inhabitant’s self-image to a particle that looks like little more than dust. Yet, when a small lamp is held in the palm of one’s hand, the specular reflection held in each cell is multiplied many times into a hypnotic cloud of stars that cascades across the large chamber and illuminates it.”

Anjali Srinivasan installing her mirrored panels. courtesy: heller gallery, new york

Recalling her experience of walking into an overstocked vessel store in 2010, Srinivasan wrote: “Every square inch of the store — gridded ceiling included — was used to suspend a shiny, curved object of stainless steel. Not in the intricate, painstaking patterns of the extinct monuments but as a massive, nebulous cloud of product and reflection whose density and form was based entirely on item stock, market demand, product design, and container size. I had encountered a palace of mirrors where each unit – a vessel – could be relocated, replaced and functional…. For me, the vessel store assumed a new-age identity of the Sheesh Mahal.”

A detail of the tetrahedron form that is at the basis of Srinivasan’s patterned installation.

In 2010, Srinivasan co-organized the exhibition “How is this glass?,” which debuted in Corning, New York, during the Glass Art Society Conference. Her work and writing has been featured in the 2011 Skoda Prize for Indian Contemporary Art exhibition and catalogue, Art Dubai (2012) & Art India (2012), and the Superposition (2011) exhibition.

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