Art given shape to by an app

88 digital drawings of artist on display at Lokame Tharavadu art expo

Artists usually do drawings using brush and ink on paper, but here is an artist who uses a primitive memo app to express ideas or feelings. ‘Alexa! Win this War!,’ a collection of 88 digital drawings, by Radha Gomathy plays out like pages from an unbound manuscript of a graphic novel about a tyrant’s violent and degrading yet comical fantasies of control and domination with a virtual digital assistant. Seen individually, and read with tiny fragments of the accompanying text, they configure violent, angst-ridden, remorseful, and ecstatic moments from the life of a couple. The work is currently being exhibited at Shed ‘D’ of the Kerala State Coir Corporation in Alappuzha, one of the venues of Lokame Tharavadu, a contemporary art exhibition curated by Bose Krishnamachari. All the drawings in the assemblage were done by Ms. Gomathy using the memo app that she had downloaded in 2018 but became her companion in 2020 during the COVID-19-induced lockdown.