Elements of Style is the third in a trilogy of exhibitions by Karthik Pandian based on two years of field research at the Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site in Collinsville, Illinois. Pandian’s exhibition at White Flag Projects stages a final encounter at the project’s place of provenance, continuing his rammed earth series and its investigation of the modern and the ancient, the monumental and the metaphysical, the artificial and the substantive.

Cahokia Byobu (Broken Screen), the large-scale sculpture that comprises the exhibition, is made of seven eight-foot-tall towers of rammed earth, between which four, repurposed mirror-glass panes have been inserted perpendicularly. Creating a set of three sculptures in the round, they bisect the gallery diagonally, yielding two equal triangular areas. Resembling Japanese folding screens, the sculpture carves out its profile in zigzag fashion, alternating between mirrored and semi-translucent glass surfaces. The slender, rectangular earthen bodies are punctuated with strata of cement, shells, mason’s line, 16mm film strips, and glass shards.

The second work, located in the gallery’s library, cites Pandian’s exhibition Unearth, which is showing concurrently at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Titled Shards, the two wall works were originally used as forms for producing rammed earth pillars. Marked with a series of cuts, the panels are surfaced with a grid, suggesting a potential function as drafting tools in an architectural or archaeological context.

The materials speak to Pandian’s process as the work itself progresses into a realm beyond physicality. What may seem a regular and constant shape in the gallery space becomes activated within the mind’s eye and ultimately the body. The mirrors project reflections that provide alternate perspectives and doubles – furnishing the work with added notions of the spiritual and the self-referential. Pandian constructs a dance of viewership that challenges the nature of the art-object, as the work and the viewer exchange roles demonstrating autonomy.

The duality that surrounds Elements of Style expands into the media of sound and light. For the exhibition’s opening, Pandian staged the works in a kind of son et lumiere production, using lighting design inspired by the Cahokia Mounds Interpretive Center and an ambient soundtrack recorded at dusk at Monk’s Mound that was also paired with a portion of text by Claude Levi-Strauss read by the narrator from the Griffith Observatory Planetarium. Featured as a one-night-only event, Cahokia Byobu (Broken Screen) was vivified by the cycling lighting program that simulated the full spectrum of light rendered from one earthly revolution around the sun. The work acquired a wholly different gravity as aspects of spectacle, entertainment, and storytelling colored the experience.

Karthik Pandian: Elements of Style is on view at White Flag Projects through Saturday, April 23. For more information about upcoming programs and exhibitions at White Flag, please visit our website at www.whiteflagprojects.org.

- Mel Trad, Intern

Tags: Cahokia Mounds, Karthik Pandian, White Flag