Rear View Mirror #70

This work features an image of the Apollo 13 space mission in the centre, an event that captured the world's imagination in April 1970. Launched from Kenney Space Center, it was supposed to be the third mission to land on the moon before it was aborted due to a failed oxygen tank. This work was created soon after this event and includes imagery that the artist loosely associated with his own feelings at the time. The image of Apollo 13, likley clipped from a magazine, has been framed in yellow, red, and green paint, as if turned into a Rajasthani miniature painting. Images of the Indian sun god Surya in his chariot pulled by horses appear as a bazaar print (lower left) and a doodle in green marker (lower right). In various Sanskrit astronomical texts, Surya is considered an important heavenly body associated with plantary motion. Six pages from an old manuscript using the Sanskrit script (devanagari) are collaged along the left side. And six screen-printed images from art history texts showing kettles, Greek vases, and Indian figures in a chariot are placed around the canvas. This work reflects the artist's interest in low tech media forms--prints from mass media of North America and India--and collage. He likens his approach to art-making to jazz music, improvising on an intuitive level between abstraction and realism, colour and monochrome, paint and ephemera.

Panchal Mansaram (P. Mansaram) was born in 1934 in Mt. Abu, Rajasthan, in western India. He studied at the Sir J. J. School of Art, Mumbai and later at the Rijks Academie, Amsterdam. In 1966, he migrated to Canada with his artist wife Tarunika and three-month-old daughter Mila. He formed a friendship with Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan that would last throughout their lives. Mansaram’s series Rear View Mirror, based on McLuhan’s writings, relates the fragmentary experience of contemporary life. It is a perspective through the rear-view mirror of a car: moving forward but with one eye on the past and seeing the world through small fragments akin to contemporary media-saturated culture. Interested in media, daily life, and cultural signs, Mansaram experimented with various techniques from printmaking and painting to photography, textiles, xerox art, and video. The technique of collage pervades much of Mansaram’s work, serving as an artistic approach that mirrored his experience as a diaspora artist. His later work employs computer manipulation to combine different techniques that Mansaram describes by coining the term "mansa-media."