You and Me

The Art of Thisath Thoradeniya:

Thisath Thoradeniya's You and Me which is now on the Red Dot Gallery at 36A, Baddegana Road South, Pitakotte will end on March 4.

by Anoli PERERA

Thisath Thoradeniya's most recent thematic engagement in sculpture shows the intense allure of the technological and electronic products found in everyday environments of the globalised contemporary world. Thoradeniya, in a series of sculptures titled "You and Me" explores the thematic of `gendered notions of everyday objects' where he highlights the categorization of certain objects in society as feminine/female and some as masculine/male. The initial attempt of this series was seen in his work titled `+ and -' which depicts a larger than life-size plug base and plug top. Thorandeniya's recent work illustrates his obvious attraction to common technological items such as computers, electrical wires and switches etc. in today's context, saturated, with electrical and electronic gadgetry, these items have become everyday and common place objects that are perceived merely as functional. They are easily accessible and easily replaceable, an attribute that makes them mundane, taken for granted and as a result their presence remains visually unnoticed. Thorandeniya's work draws us to this aspect of these electrical and electronic apparatuses and asks us the question, "are they only functional in terms of making our lives' chores efficient?"In his series of work titled `You and Me' he consciously engages in two activities. One is to take the most mundane and `taken for granted' objects from the arena of common electronic apparatuses and transform them into large scale versions. Through this transformation, he presents these objects to us as 'unique' objects. The other is, through this very process of enlarging, he subtly allows these objects to obtrude a sense of masculinized and feminized erotic sensations.