Aqsa Shakil Air-hose 2009 snow
and ink on Wasli paper 21 s 13.5 inches
Many
of us have a friend or two whose past resides in a place
an ocean-and-a-sea away, to which they return for a visit at
least once a year or so. I have several, with the ones from Africa,
the Middle East, Asia and the subcontinent seeming particularly
hard-wired to make the trip.
Aqsa Shakil is another. Born in Tanzania
and raised in Pakistan, her artist's statement observes with a dry wit, "Attached to my very bones is my international
baggage, most of which is carry-on." Some of the residual images accumulated
during all her traipsing back and forth are logged in passAGE, her
show of paintings and drawings at the Fort Worth Community Arts Center.
Among the 14-part exhibition are five
works on paper from Shakil's ongoing "rain
paintings" series, in which she collaborates with weather fronts by laying
out large sheets of Bristol under precipitation and to which, as
moisture splats the surface, she adds ink from an eye dropper.
The wildly unpredictable and organic patterns
that result ground these paintings, or cloud them, with a sort of landscape,
and it is within that accidental world that she draws and paints her very
intentional contribution in two different styles: geometric motifs, of Islamic
origin, and realist renderings, in the style of Indian Miniature Painting;
the latter made from family photographs, mostly of people whom, as Shakil
describes it, she has "known, grown
out of, or run into over the years."
She also writes, "My work has always had an underlying theme of relationships
and memories." It's quite successful here, as her layering of technique,
culture and hydrated chance produce a contact print of her own consciousness
that one might say is dead on in capturing a sense of memory. Mimicking
the foreshortening effect of hindsight, she flattens parallel universes that
in real time it is likely were not only far apart but way out of sync. Maybe
necessity is the mother of her inventions: just as, in life, she
has had to reconcile Dallas with Lahore, she has chosen in her work to reconcile
her current and past impressions of people, places and self.
Aqsa Shakil Group Hug 2009 watercolor
and ink on paper 61.5 x 45 inches
And, just as do memories, on their way here these works have crossed, and
been transformed by, multiple, concurrent timelines like so many tracks in
a rail yard (or transatlantic flights queued for take off). Shakil stated
that the paintings begun earliest changed the most over time, grew more layers
like thick foliage, compared to the later works that are more minimal, simpler
and more pure; again, like memory.
Perhaps the most intriguing and beautiful of the five rain paintings is
Group Hug (2009), what could at first glance be a still frame out of a psychedelic
film from the sixties or umber micro-organisms, paramecium and single-celled
life forms in the process of splitting into two. In their midst sparkle indigo
rosettes that drip and melt like constellations seen through clouds, and at
the bottom huddle five friends, almost lost under all this meteorological
activity and giving the work its name. Is this an enduring recollection of
best friends forever, or the bittersweet acknowledgment of how in real life
things change? Either way, at least at that moment they were locked together,
fortified against the coming storm.
In general, what may be most memorable about Shakil's work is a genuine
intimacy and surprising transparency; not the American variety that goes too
far, but a sort that because it is restrained and respectful seems more authentic,
as well as considerably richer in contrast to her Old World reserve. It fits
one who holds fast to her memories, maybe the result of so many personal items,
including people, being left behind in airports.
