The Meaning of Return: Mumbai Art Room, Mumbai

A suite of prints made directly onto the walls of the Mumbai Art Room, which will be whitewashed away at the end of the exhibition, show an array of sculptural objects laid out across an expansive floor. The squarish room in the prints, a ballet studio with a mirrored wall at one end and barres running horizontally along the other walls, is not unlike the space of the Mumbai Art Room itself, with one wall comprised entirely of panes of glass doors. Self-referentially, the previous exhibition played with the dimensions of the room, to resemble a single vitrine, or entry into the space of the diorama. In the current presentation by Scott Myles, (born 1975 in Dundee, Scotland) the public space of the gallery is likened to a ballet studio, a space of private performative gestures - like an artist studio - for rehearsal, and trial. In the ballet studio where the photographs were taken by Myles, he replaced the dancers with his own sculptures, composed of found objects - a wheelchair or the wheels of a swivel-chair, and parts the artist made to form his choreography of anthropomorphic performers in the space. The barres running horizontally may be read as a kind of horizon line, a bar for support and a line of stability, within a space of unlimited choreographic possibility for movement.