Ujwal Mantha
The Patchwork House of Night
What if all the years of your life were condensed into a physical place you could travel through? What if all those emotions, feelings and adventures were turned into a building that you could scale? The Patchwork House of Night is my attempt to answer the question with the 23 years of my own life. The House came into being one canvas every day over the month of October with each floor touching on different themes ranging from freedom, nostalgia and hope to loss and responsibility. Each canvas is accompanied by a journal entry that offers a snippet into my mind as I travel through what I've imagined as the summation of my entire life. The Patchwork House of Night is a celebration of change. It is a tribute to how far I've come and how much I've changed. This project exists in the space between two simple statements: "I'm older than I've ever been" and "I'm younger than I'll ever be". Each piece is steeped in lore and context, inviting the audience to go deeper. Whilst the subject matter is undoubtedly intimate, it is my dearest hope that viewers find the feelings and symbols discussed in this work to be relatable and accessible. There are a total of 31 planned panels, one for each day of October (The inspiration to make this artwork was greatly inspired by the popular Inktober Internet challenge). At the end, the finished work will be 6.4 ft tall, just a bit taller than myself. It seemed appropriate that this surreal and biographical foray into my inner psyche should end up being a little larger than life.
About Ujwal Mantha
Ujwal Kartik Mantha is an interdisciplinary artist based in Toronto whose work revolves around stories and the way they can inform culture, space and one's identity. Ujwal's own identity is diverse and cross-cultural and this is reflected in his work, which ranges from two dimensional and three dimensional mediums to digital art. During his time at the University of Toronto, Ujwal worked on a number of projects at the intersection of the Arts and Social Sciences such as the Visual Dictionary of Sociology and the Inadmissables Glossary and his work has gone on to be used teaching material for the first year class at the University of Toronto. His work has been featured in a number of exhibitions such as ARTSIDEOUT, the Shelley Peterson Student Art Exhibition and the 36th Scarborough Arts Annual Juried Art Exhibition.