Sharda Umanath
At One Moment
September 6-23, 2022
Sprague Gallery
Butterfly Moon, 2019, black tea on canvas, 24 x 18 inches.
Sprague Gallery is pleased to announce Sharda Umanath – At One Moment. Sharda Umanath, who serves on the CMC psychology faculty, is a cognitive psychologist and a painter. What began as a “peace-giving outlet,” Umanath says, while she was working on her doctoral dissertation has developed into a sustainable practice of making, selling, and donating. The artist sells the work through her online shop, PaintsHerDreams, and donates the profit to charities and nonprofits chosen on a painting-by-painting basis.
This exhibition discovers Umanath’s interest in the materiality and the locatability of things. The selected works from 2015 to 2022, although abstract, formally suggest a clear bodily schema of the subject – of the brain, the macrophage, the mountain, and the light. The demarcation drawn amidst the unending groupings of often indistinguishable lines and masses is active and immediate: the dining table turns into a make-shift studio; anything capable of putting down the paint onto the surface becomes the tool, such as the brush, anything that can scrape, and the finger; in addition to the traditional paint mediums such as acrylic, tea is used; and the techniques vary from gestural to dripping and splattering. Such activity and immediacy of the subject and in the process, however, brings an exception in the case of “Butterfly Moon” (2019), where the constant marking and dancing of the bodies make only their traces tangible.
Sharda Umanath – At One Moment opens on September 6 and continues through September 23, 2022. Gallery hours are Monday through Friday, 8AM to 5PM. The exhibition is open to the public. The Covid-19 guidelines will be updated as new information becomes available.
The exhibition is curated by arts director Julia Hong of the HMC Department of Humanities, Social Sciences, and the Arts.