TARQ is delighted to present Brick by Brac, a group exhibition conceived and organised by artists Tom Burckhardt and Sameer Kulavoor, bringing together ten artists from across India and the United States whose practices share a sustained investment in incrementalism, repetitiveness, sequentiality and multiplicity — the accumulative, serial, and process-driven act of making work one mark, one fragment, one brick at a time.
The exhibition takes its cue from the act of building: more often than not, making work begins with one brick, then another, then another, as artists get lost in the increments. Rather than a singular, decisive mode of making, the works gathered here pursue meaning through discovery and accumulation, lending a sense of the anti-heroic — not attempting definite statements for imagined audiences, but moving sideways, from particular to particular. Working in bits and humble in material, these practices reflect a daily attentiveness to process rather than product. All the works in this exhibition were made with an economy of materials, able to pack a whole show off in a suitcase.
The exhibition brings together ten artists working across drawing, collage, photography, film, and mixed media. Amy Sillman's works embody the logic of the "draw-er" — building inductively from particulars, scratching and pawing at paper with tools the scale of the hand, moving sideways rather than toward any overarching view. Matthew Northridge's two ongoing series rearrange found graphic fragments into dilapidated architectural forms set against pastoral wilderness, and build 361-cell collage grids from found materials, each element appearing only once. Sameer Kulavoor's Blur Memo uses a found monthly memo pad to structure an evolving drawn timelapse, adding one mark at a time in response to the collapsing rhythms of urban life. Sharon Horvath's composite works on paper assemble magazine imagery spanning six decades into rhizomic wall installations that grow like flat coral, rhyming across mineral, vegetable, and cultural registers. Shruti Mahajan contemplates instruments of language and making — wooden tools fashioned into strings of script, old letters reassembled into books that cannot be read, meaning loitering just out of reach. Sunil Padwal's intricate linear works oscillate between clarity and abstraction in a manner that mirrors the functioning of memory, with recurring imagery unfolding and enduring as history is revisited and built, and meaning is renewed. Tim Davis presents Upstate Event Horizon, a vast archive of photographs made travelling across upstate New York, displayed on a table as a society of images that viewers are invited to handle, sift through, and reorder. Tom Burckhardt constructs his book-page works from cut and shuffled pages of once-coherent narratives, inviting viewers into a space suspended between poetry, politics, and unresolved meaning. T Venkanna's recurring figures and gestures reappear across formats and media not as repetition but as sustained attention, a rhythm in which the hand leads and the mind cannot plan ahead. Vishwa Shroff's Walking into Abstraction maps the dissolution of a wall into pure form through drawings made at intervals following the Fibonacci sequence, linking mathematical patterns to the sonic structures of Sanskrit poetry.
Recognising this shared methodology across the practices of peers spanning geographies, Burckhardt and Kulavoor bring these works together in a shared space — seeking an experience that feels greater than the sum of its parts.
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