Bright Oriental Star (2011) By Rachel Kalpana James Video Installation 8 minutes In making art, I explore concepts of personal interest that are inspired by my South Asian heritage, immigrant experience and love of reading and books, especially fiction. My practice is mainly installation. I create an experience through the arrangement of objects, through the atmosphere created by light and sound, and through visual stimuli itself to evoke an emotional and intellectual response to the act of seeing and experiencing. I consider that an audience always responds from varied backgrounds, knowledge and biases. The audience, by necessity, makes their own associations and conclusions, but as artists we can choose to intervene, disrupt or support that process. In general, my interest is in revealing the subtle and not so subtle ways in which authority impacts our understanding of the world and ourselves. I work with, and critique the authoritative system of the archive and language, which includes examining colonialism’s legacy and its impact. I research history, myths, artefacts and look for hints and clues of what’s missing. I probe issues of belonging and identity - our tenuous perception of ourselves, in relation to both our political and our emotional place in the world. I’m interested in how we come to know things, about ourselves, and others not only through knowledge, but knowledge’s imperfections. My goal in constructing installations is to encourage a reading between the lines, a seeing beyond what is presented, and an understanding that we too build meaning, by filling in the gaps. I came to know about Tagore’s 1929 visit to Canada while looking at a painting by Group of Seven artist Fred Varley. An unlikely source for such a discovery! The Group of Seven were a group of Canadian painters in the 1920s, originally consisting of Franklin Carmichael, Lawren Harris, A. Y. Jackson, Franz Johnston, Arthur Lismer, J. E. H. MacDonald, and Frederick Varley. The Group of Seven is most famous for their iconic paintings of the Canadian landscape. In looking at Varley’s painting, Portrait of Mrs. E. (1921) there are visual clues or eastern (Indian) signifiers. The subject, Mrs. E., sits in a yoga pose, a dupatta wrapped round her neck, an otherworldly look upon her face. What arose within me was a particular sense of cultural affinity, and curiousity. Dharana (1932) another Varley painting shows a meditating figure in a landscape. The figure, land and sky are wonderfully alive through the artist’s swirling gesture and use of colours, expressing one’s union with nature. Though much is written about the Group’s spiritual landscapes, and their influences (European impressionism, the transcendentalism of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman, theosophy and eastern philosophies), it was the Art Gallery of Ontario curator, Denis Reid’s Concise History of Canadian Painting (1973) which named Tagore in relation to Varley and made me wonder about Tagore’s specific influence on the Group. In Gitanjali (1913), Tagore writes: “The same stream of life that runs through my veins night and day runs through the world and dances in rhythmic measures. It is the same life that shoots in joy through the dust of the earth in numberless blades of grass and breaks into tumultuous waves of leaves and flowers. It is the same life that is rocked in the ocean-cradle of birth and of death, in ebb and in flow. I feel my limbs are made glorious by the touch of this world of life. And my pride is from the life-throb of ages dancing in my blood this moment.” If there was any influence or link between Tagore and the Group of Seven, little is written perhaps because of the colonial biases at the time. When Tagore won the Nobel prize in 1913, it was written in

the Toronto Globe: “It is the first time that the Nobel prize has gone to anyone who is not what we call white. It will take time of course for us to accommodate ourselves to the idea that anyone called Rabindranath Tagore should receive a world prize for literature (Have we not been told that the East and West shall not meet?) The name has a curious sound. The first time we saw it in print it did not seem real.” So can East meet West in The Group of Seven’s paintings? These paintings, mostly of uninhabited wilderness have become iconic of Canadian identity. Group of Seven artist, Lawren Harris described his artistic aim as, “toward a purer creative expression, wherein the artist, alters colours, and by changing and reshaping forms, intensifies the austerity and beauty of formal relationships, and so creates a somewhat new world from the aspect of the world we commonly see.” For Bright Oriental Star I tried to follow this dictum. Visually, the stylized depictions of Canadian landscapes in the video installation are deliberate alterations. I’ve applied a particular digital effect to distort the image. I’ve allowed some digital pixilation and a shakiness of handheld camera footage. Then, I chalked the projection surface to transform the moving image into a painterly yet obviously constructed scene. Bright Oriental Star deals in myths and icons of considerable weight. There is Tagore (a towering icon of the exotic east –even in his own country), the Group of Seven (forever frozen as myth-makers of Canadian identity), a tipi (an easy signifier of the aboriginal peoples), nature (the vast spiritual canvas), the Nobel prize (world designator of greatness and genius). How do we each respond to the complex meanings associated with each? I chose newspaper headlines and art history to set the authoritative tone and refer to a particular narrative of Tagore’s 1929 visit. Tagore wins the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913 for his prose poem Gitanjali. He received many invitations to Canada, but repeatedly declined those invitations in protest of Canada’s treatment of his countrymen in the infamous Komagata Maru incident of 1914 –where 376 British Indian subjects were denied entry into Canada. When Tagore finally visited Canada in 1929, thousands came to hear him lecture and The Canadian Theosophist reported, “He was the bright oriental star of the occasion…” And Reid writes in The Concise History of Canadian Painting (1973) that artists assisted in bringing Tagore to Vancouver in 1929. I then surmise that Varley helped facilitate Tagore’s visit. For Bright Oriental Star, I break the headlines or sentences into individual flashing words. The emphasis on each word beating out like a news flash or a pulse disrupts, and calls attention to the significance of that word. In some instances, we lose sight of the overall meaning of the sentence or headline. Through this process, I am interested in what is triggered for the audience by the choice of words: Thou, endless, British, Hindu, poet-mystic, wins, shuns, Nobel, clamour, thousands, bright oriental, star? The historical details of Tagore’s connection to the Group of Seven are deliberately oblique due to colonialism’s legacy, cultural amnesia, or perhaps it’s nonexistent. In Bright Oriental Star, I present the constructed and natural, the documentary and painterly, fact and fiction. They all collide in this immersive visual walk through Canadian landscapes and history. Rachel Kalpana James, 2011