Nandan Ghiya is a former fashion design student who
is now using a combination of photographs, paints, and found items to create
intriguing mixed media portraits. In his series entitled “deFacebook” Ghiya
obscures peoples’ defining facial characteristics by manually pixelating images
with paint. Sometimes a person’s face becomes only two blocks of color. Pieces
are cut and rearranged in a jagged ‘download error’ means of composition. Faces
are taken away and bodies are disjointed, which almost complete strips the
people of their human quality.
I feel his more successful pieces are the images that
have been broken apart, and even the frame they are placed in has been
deconstructed in the same way. It is small details such as that which really
catch my attention. The works where the image is deconstructed, but the frame
has not been deconstructed, seem somehow less intentional, and thus less
important and interesting.
This series is an excellent portrayal of how the
endless bombardment of imagery and information in today’s technological culture
has desensitized our society. According to Nandan, “All individual or cultural
value systems are defined by various physical factors ranging from ethnography,
geography or economy. However, the advent of the digital has relocated
everything on a virtual space. I grew up to a family of traditional art dealers
in Jaipur, the 400 years old capital of Rajasthan. We had such old pictures
hanging on our ancestral house walls. These were images of ancestors, gurus or
political heroes. These had different associations for different people.
Everyone connected with them at one level or another.” These portraits make the
viewer consider the large influence that digital technology, the Internet, and
social networking have on culture and personal identity.
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