Friday!
The Irma Freeman Center presents our current exhibition,
Tales of Cursive Lands
Tales of Cursive Lands by sāgar and Ravindra Kamath opens with an artist reception First Friday, August 4th and closes Regular Gallery hours are Saturdays from 2-5 pm and by appointment. The Irma Freeman Center welcomes groups to book events and tours to experience this engaging and visually provocative exhibit. For information call: (gallery office) 412-924-0634
Tales of Cursive Lands is a two person, father and son, collaborative exhibition opening Friday, August 4th 2023. Ravi and sāgar construct images evoking landscapes of heritage, memory, reality, and dreams. This dialogue between father and son chronicles feelings of transition and plurality, creating landscapes born of hybrid Indo-Western experiences. This duo show features paintings created independently and collaboratively by Ravi and sāgar, exploring a variety of relationships with lands near and far, real and imagined.
sāgar and Ravindra Kamath, Pinaka Art
Ravi and sāgar have been working together through Pinaka Art for three years. During this time, they have collaborated to create two murals for Adda Coffee&Tea, were selected as the Emerging Artist Award for the Three Rivers Arts Festival 2021, and performed live paintings for multiple events across the city. This exhibition is their first collaborative gallery show.
sāgar Kamath
sāgar’s art education began at a young age with his father and continued through his time at Pittsburgh CAPA 6-12. sāgar received his Bachelor of Science in civil engineering at the University of Pittsburgh and his Master of Fine Arts in multidisiplinary art at the Maryland Institute College of Art, Mount Royal School of Art. sāgar has had exhibitions and performances in Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Raleigh, Baltimore, New York, and Washington DC. In May 2023, sāgar was invited as an Artist-in-Residence for the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art’s Centennial Festival.
Within the paintings, sāgar and Ravi draw upon various aesthetic theories such as affect, color, and Rasa (Indian AestheticTheory relating to visual and performing arts). These paintings are questioning time and landscape through heritage, climate anxieties, and transformation. While zooming in and out of their scenes, the viewer explores a variety of vantage points the dynamics of the cursive lands.
Ravindra Kamath
Ravi is a self-taught artist from a small village named Panjadka in Karnataka, India and is now working in Pittsburgh, PA. With over four decades of experience in painting, Ravi's work has appeared across India and the American East Coast in magazines, galleries, and in private and public spaces through murals and floor paintings. He is a current member of the Associated Arts of Pittsburgh.
sāgar grapples with ecology as it relates to identity and land.
Through dialogues with gesture and line, sāgar’s landscapes conjure tumultuous imaginations of anger, erasure, collapse, dance, while simultaneously playing with the non-linearity of time.
sāgar’s work serves as a witness to climate change, interrogating the concept of invasiveness—often associated with plant life—and layering that with ideas of home, migration, and diasporic identity.
Ravi’s constructed images evoke feelings of nostalgia and fantasy.
He considers the daily interactions between each of us and the natural environment. While painting, Ravi creates textures using rices and grains to connect the materiality of the canvas with the world within. The paintings center around stories of humble beginnings, a life without technology moving to a more stressful, glamorous and overwhelming American lifestyle. Within the paintings, Ravi weaves stories of tradition and culture with the intent to record and pass down.
