A novel dimension

GRAPHICS, THOUGH a very advanced form of art in the West and even in the Indian advertising world, is still in its infancy in Kerala. Even with all the advances the State has made in the field of Information Technology (IT), it has a long way to go to in appreciating graphic designing as an art form.
Using software such as Photoshop and equipment such as photo scanner, G. Mini has attempted to impart a visual dimension to some of the greatest plays in history. Her exhibition of graphic posters and installations, `Play Light', is an attempt to give a completely different dimension to the commercial activity of designing posters for theatre and cinema.
The exhibition, which was on at Suryakanthi Art Gallery, was an attempt at visual interpretation of some plays that the artist has directed along with her husband. Anything that forms part of our daily life - a remote control, her son's wooden toys, an old memento, an ice-cream cup - finds a meaning that is intricately connected with the graphical representation of theatre in Mini's works.
"Everything is interconnected and forms a part of life," says Mini. A poster for Romeo and Juliet has a Fair and Lovely skin cream tube included in the frame. Could anything be more telling? The poster depicts King Lear depicts the various stages of his life and even the colours of his life. The whiteness of his beard frames the poster. This writer, absorbed as he was in a poster of Othello, the `Moor of Venice', does a sacrilegious act by knocking over an installation and causing the artist to exclaim "Desdemona dies!" Another attractive poster was `The Mask' and Mini's favourite among these are `In-Out', `The Room' and Bertolt Brechts' `The Good Woman of Schetswan'. `In-Out' was an improvisation of Jean-Paul Sartre's `The Room'. For Mini, even Octavio Paz's poem, `Sunstone', needed to be visually depicted and it came out as an appealing work.
"Here, in Kerala, nobody considers theatre as a professional art. As a consequence, designing posters for a play does not count as important," says Mini, a postgraduate in Theatre Art Design and Direction from the National School of Drama, New Delhi. "In Delhi, designing and making props is part of a professional set up and poster design is a key component while staging a play."