Of loss and the other Damon
Man rediscovers his self both in connection and confrontation with the city in the etchings of Australian print maker Damon Kowarsky 

By Quddus Mirza

Damon Kowarsky, the Australian print maker, recently held his solo exhibition 'Home and Away' at Alhamra Art Gallery Lahore. He is an artist in residence and visiting faculty at the Beaconhouse National University; before coming to Lahore, he visited other parts of the world including Yemen, Egypt and Mexico.

His etchings in the show depict that displacement is the main theme for the artist who is living away from his home. In this respect he is not alone; a number of people in the metropolises today are alien citizens who have moved from their homelands.

This kind of dislocation produces a certain type of behaviour: of surviving [in] a contradiction. We experience this attitude among people who live in a particular place, but often appear to be in a state of constant discontentment. This kind of response mainly develops because of hardship, frustration and failure one faces in the daily struggle for survival.

To cope with their difficult situations, several among us choose to create an imaginary setting, containing elements from our places of origin and picked up from memory. Here the mind operates in a positive manner; it transforms the past experiences into pleasant (yet imagined) realities. The social setup of big cities -- with minimum personal contact and huge crowds of unknown people swarming in the shopping malls, streets, parks and other urban places -- aggravates the feeling of loneliness.

In that sense, man rediscovers his self both in connection and confrontation with the city. City assumes a great significance in the psyche of a citizen who perceives it as a combination of structures that are unknown, uninviting and unbearable. Perhaps, for him, roaming in the city is an experience not much dissimilar from moving in a desert, since in both places one tends to lose the sense of direction and gets an illusion of being lost.

Actually this interaction between a human being and a space constructed/divided into buildings and houses is a relatively new urban phenomenon. People, who migrate from villages, find it hard to spend their lives in isolated structures -- be they flats, quarters or bungalows -- detached from their nextdoor neighbours. This social pattern is new for our public; yet it manages to subvert urban alienation by making connections with others living in the same surroundings.

So, for a majority of us, the urban experience is not only about isolation; it could be a means to create new bonds and establish new relationships. But not everyone in other parts of the world shares the same experience. Often, living in industrial cities of the West is like being lost in a concrete jungle. Hordes of people are rushing from one place to the other -- walking close to others, but without having the faintest idea of their identity or existence. Their entire concentration is focused on their destinations -- offices, apartments, restaurants etc.

This search, which is almost a norm in every big city of the world, appears to be the primary concern for Damon Kowarsky. In his prints, human beings are drawn in relation to the built environment. A large figure of a man almost half naked (probably in an attempt to depict a man without any national identification, which is possible through the style of clothes) is set against a blocks of houses and a jumble of buildings. He appears to be an outsider, trying to reach the heart of a city that is apparently devoid of inhabitants.

But in an interesting paradox, this outsider -- the primordial figure who is away from the houses -- is the real city. As cities are formed with human population, so one can not conceive a town without people; and in some way, the city is not outside of man, it is the man himself that makes the city. Somehow, this situation is similar to one of the stories of Jorge Luis Borges. In his story 'The Approach to Al-Mu'tasim' (also the title of one print by Kowarsky), a man is split into different identities -- becoming himself the subject of his writing. The story ends with a reference to the Persian text 'Mantiq ur Tair', in which a large number of birds fly to search their king Simurgh who, after the hard course of journey, on reaching their destination, find out that only thirty of them survived the journey. Then they realise that actually they themselves are Simurgh, the king of birds (because Simurgh literally means thirty birds).

Likewise, the lonely figure on the outskirts of the city is the city itself. So even though it is away, it is not detached. This seems to be the fate of many people around us, who can identify with the situations created by Damon Kowarsky.

Besides the obvious theme of alienation in these prints, it is the deft handling of materials that contributes towards making his work more meaningful. The simplified drawing of a masculine figure, constructed with a few lines and marks, conveys the essential position of a man looking longingly towards the estranged world. This basic aspect of human behaviour is enhanced with the rendering of cityscape (inspired from various places such as Mexico City and Cairo) like an unfathomable wall. The lines of houses with details of pipes, windows, doors and other details stretch like a fortress behind the man.

The narrative of man and the built environment may have a personal interpretation for Damon, since Lahore is the recent port of arrival in his itinerary of travels. We have to wait to find out in what way the city of Lahore will emerge in his work in future. Looking at his exhibition at Alhamra, one assumes that it may not be too different since the city in his work is an internal site -- an element that makes his work interesting, relevant and familiar, even though he comes from another continent, Australia.