Rann Walk Ocean is one example of an ongoing series of video paintings by Bapa and Liluye Jhala. The VPs are anchored in the idea of the magical mundane. Particular, daily, seasonal, cyclical, episodic, and millennial events occur in all ecologies and environments. All living things domesticate them even as they impregnate them. More importantly, they celebrate them. These environments are mirrored in the habits and patterns of the imagined possible: between species and between humans. The magical mundane is a phrase for the normal that offers surprise to the alien.
An ethno-surreal response evokes experience through memory of the fragment, of immensity through the momentary. The quirky, improbable, unexpected imagined. It suggests relationships and interdependence without demonstration. Communication occurs through transduction, by travel along tangents, and is palpable if it resonates with the viewer. Explanation is not attempted, suggestion births inquiry.
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All rights reserved, Jayasinhji Jhala
[Bio c. 2009] Bapa Jhala is a visual anthropologist at Temple University. Trained as a gemologist, filmmaker and anthropologist Bapa Jhala assembles mobile sculptures from organic materials, makes ethnographic and ‘other’ films and jewels where the process of inclosing mineral in metal is reversed and jade and quartz and other gem materials are embedded with other minerals and metals. www.temple.edu/anthro/jhala/index.html Rann Walk Ocean: Jayasinhji Jhala , Liluye Jhala, Courtney Stoll Steps Walk Red: Jayasinhji Jhala Liluye Jhala, Keith Marchiafava, Marika Otto's Descent: Jayasinhji Jhala, Rhett Grumbkow, Anirudhsinh Jadeja
Ethnographic Terminalia first exhibition was a group exhibition of installation works that showed at the Ice Box gallery (Crane Arts, Philadelphia)