Sequin, Shadow

Artists

Vijay Masharani

Press release

Vijay Masharani follows the contour of the artistic process, composing drawings and videos on an
ongoing basis. Artworks sediment decision and discovery. Forms split into forms. It’s like the Large
Hadron Collider. An understanding of novelty remains illegal.
Sequin, Shadow features mostly permutations of recombinable elements: circles, semicircular arches,
and others. These works also consider interactions between line, light, and color, and their capacity to
signify. For example, the figure:

Contains the following possible clauses:

And their inverse:

In this example, the word “is” was substituted in for the double-headed arrow; other predicates would
work fine, such as:
Means, connotes, effaces, is empty of, differs from, breaks.

Blood is Red
Ocean is Blue
Enigma is Green

Ocean is Red
Enigma is Blue
Blood is Green

Enigma is Red
Blood is Blue
Ocean is Green

Red is Blood
Blue is Ocean
Green is Enigma

Red is Ocean
Blue is Enigma
Green is Blood

Red is Enigma
Blue is Blood
Green is Ocean

And so on. They could be imagined on a third disc, replacing the arrow between the two depicted
above.
For simplicity’s sake, the diagram features three terms per disc, but each could include more and/or
other terms suggested by the artworks, such as:
Fog, crown, circle, vision, eld, body, yellow, heat, molecule, color, death, robe, paper,
sequence, mask, star, ood, light, head, tree, planet, night, fate, arch, life, turquoise, dark,
time, gure, line, horizon, pink, air.
And so on.
Some of the resulting clauses would “work,” some would require condition or modification, some
would require concession to speaking in poetry (often to unsatisfying ends), others would read as
totally nonsensical. More than a few would provoke consternation or enjoyment. In total, they evoke
an image of an ecosystem of more and less worthwhile statements about an artwork. We don’t have
equal say in determining the criteria of what makes them worthwhile. That will have to be, like
everything else, hashed out. If it can’t be hashed out, it will be hacked out.
Boxes open, bottles pop, bells ring. Things don’t un-happen. Exogenous shocks (wars, fires, plagues,
etc.), changes in social structure (precipitated by new laws, technologies, alliances born and broken,
generations dying off and coming of age, etc.), and individual experiences (voyages, encounters,
decisions, etc.)—form path dependencies that have and will change the terms available, the
relationships between them, whether or not a sayable clause makes sense, and whether or not a
sensible claim takes us anywhere. Because of this, an artwork’s capacity to signify is unstable,
durational, and perennially deferred. It may “run” now or later; it may have “ran” in the past but today
appear arrested. It may peter out in seconds, or never get moving. There is no way to ensure any
outcome—there is only a gambit, made and paid and played out in time. Barring messianic rupture or
human extinction, there is no way out of this situation. Relitigation never stops.
Artworks do things other than signify, however. For instance: while we circulate, they tend to stay
where they are.
In order to not contain the hermeneutic