Nature Morte is pleased to present a solo exhibition of new works by the artist Navin Thomas.
Thomas takes his inspiration from music, thinking about improvisation and timing, and how these qualities can be expressed in concrete objects. The artist has commented: “I started to think about music as a landscape, as a playground, a left and a right, lots of highs and then soft lows, long pauses and rearrangements, commas, hyphens, brackets, periods, and exclamation marks. Pauses are important. You begin to listen to the atmosphere of spaces, sometimes delightful and sometimes engaging, and then sometimes just quiet and resonating.”

The exhibition is composed of multiple series of works, composed mostly of wood with other added materials. One series, entitled “Study of Jogger’s Lanes,” is both interactive and musical. Exploiting the variegated colors of different types of wood, these are fused together using precise marquetry techniques, becoming complex hieroglyphics. These structures disguise the simple mechanisms of old-fashioned music boxes, with multiples inside of each piece. The keys to the music boxes are scattered across the face of the construction, allowing the viewer to activate one or all of the devices. The aural result can be a soothing nostalgic lilt or something akin to the sounds of a madhouse.

Another series of works, entitled “Study of Daylight in Phases,” consists of rectilinear lattices in different configurations, each in a pair of complementary colors, their structures diffused by the play of shadows across their surfaces along with backdrops of colored acrylic sheets. “Fictional Symphony Halls” is the title of a group of architectonic models that are propped up on stilt-like legs. Complex and kinetic, each is its own folly, suggesting a theater or a temple, a spaceship or a birdhouse. A final untitled series is of four works that resemble unfolding frames, or perhaps windows or the easels for paintings. These complex shapes contain cryptic pictograms: birds, mountains, lungs, yardsticks, and a sprinkling of eyes.

About the artist
Navin Thomas (born 1974) is a sculptor and sound artist, working predominantly with mixed media and found materials. He was educated in cinematography and graphic design, and now experiments with acoustics, integrating sounds of ecology and built architecture. Steering away from activism, his approach to art-making involves a reinterpretation of the traditional notions of the natural world and its ever changing landscapes. The artist explains “earlier as part of my practice I liked to observe what a city discarded and try make more sense of it through my work which lead me to the idea of acoustic ecology and its relationship in built architecture and the way it constantly moves away and re-represents itself from the old formal ways of the landscape as a stage.”

Thomas’s works have been included in numerous group exhibitions in prestigious institutions such as the 10th Anniversary Show at Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi (2020); Flight of the Fabricator, Maximillan Forum, Munich, Germany (2017); Bright Noise, Lalit Kala Akademi (2014) and Generation in Transition, Zacheta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw (2011). Additionally, Navin’s work has been a part of Whorled Explorations, curated by Jitish Kallat, Kochi-Muziris Biennale, Kochi (2014), and Art Walk Water, EuropaliaIndia, Liege (2013–14). He is the recipient of a grant from the India Foundation for the Arts for his extended art practice towards a book on salvaged photo negatives (2013), The Skoda Prize for Contemporary Art (2012), and a grant from Sarai (CSDS) to make an audio map of busking performances at popular city railway stations (2003).