Srinivas Surti 

The poetic image as spatial practice

 

Srinivas Surti has been translating residual aspects of studio practice (material tests, models, sketches and photographs) into content. Developing propositional works for a technical object that might be too absurd or implausible to construct. Rather than a flight of fancy, this is a type of unconstrained freedom for spatial design that questions ideas of architectural function. In the text Eye & Mind, Maurice Merleau-Ponty uses the analogy of the mirror to define technical objects as things that are emblematic in terms of seeing and experiencing presence and visibility. This idea will be used as a premise to create a form of online spatial practice using imported images, objects, textures and patterns. The project evolved organically with techniques of layering and extrusion playing a key part. The visual space is punctuated with 3D text fragments to develop my core interests around the poetic-image as a spatial motif for articulating ideas of cultural and social co-presence. By integrating object, sign and space the research attempts to ask how a sense of individual agency might be reclaimed in the progressive melding of image, commodity and space.

 

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Srinivas Surti’s recent projects have focused on re-working motifs associated with Romanticism and Modernism which now appear in forms of commercial display, packaging and spatial design. For example, the use of the horizon or grid within advertising as a backdrop to signify ideas of style, purity or authenticity. By combining sources from different cultural and historical contexts, these tropes of visual consumption are reformatted into forms of abstraction and resemblance. Drawing and the process of translation between image and object or digital and material plays an integral role within this. It is a means to work across disciplines using the improvisational nature of collage and the sculptural potential of painting.