From the outside looking in

Georgia O’Keefe, a foundational modernist painter most known for her floral and landscape paintings once said: “One can’t paint New York as it is, but rather as it is felt.”

O'Keefe's residency in the city occurred during its extreme architectural expansion. Her lesser known body of work is entitled ‘My New Yorks’ and the series of paintings are a bird's eye perspective of New York City.

The ongoing exhibition ‘Under the Same Roof’ at Siddhartha Art Gallery by Subodh Bhandari and Sambridhi Ratna Shakya resembles O’Keefe’s ‘love letters to New York’. 

Bhandari, a Patan newcomer and Shakya, a Patan native, work together to honour their architectural surroundings using mixed media. ‘A Walk Through the City’ is a conglomeration of miniature window replicas. 

The duo took snapshots of rapidly changing communities, and both styles are similar in their directness. The two artists reconstruct observations through stylistic fabrication, and capture the sensation of traversing a street, suddenly making ordinary objects artistic.

‘Under the Same Roof’ centres around Patan’s doors, powerlines, and most notably windows. The two artists roam alleyways looking for features that pique their interest, committing them to memory with photography. 

Bhandari and Shakya do not allow the objects to go unnoticed, forever examining details which others frequently overlook. For the artists, rendering everyday entities creates unification through relatability. Their overall message focuses on coexistence and interconnectedness. Specifically how easily accessible, recurring items, visible to all, establish familiarity and speak volumes via silence. 

The artists inject bits of lived experiences into their reproductions, concealing personal artefacts such as bed sheets or posters within windows. They place humanity upon inanimate objects, allowing for exploration of a unified history. 

Each window represents a personal memory rather than something imagined, as they are constructed from photographs the artists themselves took. Walking into the gallery feels as if you are entering a collective memory. The approximately 500 wooden windows, with photo transfer and acrylic details, engulf the first floor. 

The incredible amount of small windows establish an immersive experience, prompting the viewer to question, whose homes are attached, what type of people have lived there and for how long? The diversity of each piece astounds the eye. With so much repetition, how can the individual elements be entirely unique? 

Windows are a common occurrence, present in any building. Viewing this commonality clustered together reveals the personal rather than architectural elements which make them individualistic. 

Their quaint Patan studio is on the second floor of a residential building with a blindingly mint green room, slightly dusty from the drills and grinders used for constructing and polishing sculptures. 

Bhandari says he has always yearned for an artistic lifestyle, whereas Shakya picked up a knack for it after a classroom quarrel regarding his artistic abilities at Kathmandu University where both had the same motivation to capture their surroundings. 

The two differ in being native and new to the Patan area. So, is this exhibition about new vs native? Bhandari replied: “The idea of new vs native is no more about new vs native, it’s more about new and native, both the things coexisting together.”

This is a metaphorical representation of their windows: what can you know about someone from outside appearances? Each window represents a specific period in time, whether it was constructed yesterday or 20 years ago, whether it houses a young family or one which has lived there for generations.

The message is to understand how these elements help us coexist, by placing these varying periods of life centimetres apart from each other. It creates a space in which being surrounded by others is inevitable regardless of differences. 

Star Ross is an undergraduate at Princeton University studying Medical Anthropology alongside Visual Arts and Climate Science.