Casa Blanca 2 | New No.

16 | Main Street | Chennai, Tamil Nadu | INDIA

+91 90 0325 8086 | +91 90 0834 0110 | cb2n16@gmail.com

Make Them Love You

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
29 April, 2009
Exhibition dates: 18 May - 13 June, 2009
Opening: Saturday,16 May, 2009, 6:30-9:30pm

For more information contact:

SHANNON SPANHAKE & PIERRE CONTI Casa Blanca 2 presents Make Them Love You, a series of hand-
+91 90 0325 8086 painted signs exhibited throughout the city of Chennai that explore the
cb2n16@gmail.com negotiation between interior desires and exterior space.

For us, the sign clusters that punctuate Chennai’s landscape seem to
turn the city inside-out - masking the container (the building) while reveal-
ing its contents (the businesses inside). The signs, in a constant state of
becoming, compete for attention to fill the negative space of the city’s built
environment with unregulated explosions of internal desires.

Make Them Love You uses the sign clusters as an exhibition space to
display the artwork of ten participants who were asked to design a sign ad-
Cocktails & Talk / Opening: vertising a personal interior/exterior dialectic exploring notions of celebrity,
Art World Gallery sacrifice, development, and narcissism.
12,Ganeshpuram
3rd Street, (Off Cenotaph Rd.) “We Intend to be Happy” by artists Roberto Freddi & Jason Moore,
Teynampet, Chennai presents the artists themselves dressed in camouflage in front of the
044 2431 5371 British flag. This self-portrait is a nod to their heroic overcoming of the

S.A.V painting “We Intend to be Happy” by Roberto
Freddi & Jason Moore
Participating artists:
Prayas Abhinav (Bangalore)
Artist
Sarath Babu (Chennai)
Food King CEO
The Banyan (Chennai)
NGO
Roxanne Borujerdi (Paris)
Artist
Casa Blanca 2 AKA Teddy Cruz
(Chennai)
Art gallery
Roberto Freddi
& Jason Moore (London)
Artists
Jessica Wallack (Chennai)
Researcher
Postmasters Gallery (New York)
Art gallery
Revathy (Chennai)
Film actress and Director
S.A.V Elanchezian (Chennai)
Artist
strenuous administrative process, enabling them to enjoy a cup of tea while
living together, as a couple, in London. The camouflage and dog tags evoke
the larger debate of homosexuality and the military while also playing with the
material function of camouflage. They transform the composition of flat shapes
without foreground or background (camouflage’s primary function: to absorb
one into the background) into a mechanism to project them and their story
into the foreground by exploiting its use within popular culture. The Kollywood
film actress and director Revathy presents an actual-size autograph of ‘Asha
Kelunni’, her real name. And Bangalore-based artist, Prayas Abhinav’s, piece
states “Now Food is Within Your Reach”, is a promotion of his current work on
urban gardening while also presenting a possibility of how art can address the
needs of his country.
The participants were asked to design a signboard exploring an interior/exterior
dialectic and the designs were then hand-painted by a team of Chennai-based
sign painters offering an additional layer of interpretation between the artist, the
environment, and the exhibition.
Artist/architect Teddy Cruz confirmed his participation in the exhibition but
didn’t produce a piece - so we made one for him. The artist is seen imposed on
the landscape in view of the sign painter. A virtual playback of an interior desire
held by the gallery projected through the perspective of the sign painter himself.
The poor quality photo taken with a mobile phone camera while eating lunch in
San Diego is reinterpreted, shifting both the quality and the context of what is
familiar and what is foreign.
Artists Roxanne Borujerdi and Postmasters Gallery explore the ambiguity be-
tween two-dimensional and three-dimensional spaces as an impression of worlds
within-worlds. And the work of Jessica Wallack and Sarath Babu, points to the
transition from private to public and back again, playing with the external as both
nemesis and ally. While, the piece made by residents and staff of The Banyan
present handwritten statements and images of embroidery, interweaving the physi-
cal and the psychological into blindspots of perception.
Chennai-based artist and sign painter, S.A.V Elanchezian, will not disclose details
of his sign at this moment, saying, “It’s my problem, if I just want to just put one
letter, I’ll do it”.
Hanging the artworks within sign clusters around Chennai is an effort to evoke the
relationship between place and self. Make Them Love You recognizes that desire
is externalized in the very formation of place and that place itself is lived as much
internally as externally.
The artwork will be on display at Art World Gallery on the 15 & 16 May before we
hang them amngst the sign clusters on Narasingapuram street (off Anna Salai,
maps provided at the opening).
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Casa Blanca 2: New No. 16 is an art gallery based in the city of Chennai, India. We have
no physical space of our own, but rather we borrow public space for exhibitions. This effort
is to raise a dialogue about access and agency to view and make art, while charging the
ordinary proximity between people and place.
For more information contact Shannon Spanhake +91 90 0325 8086.
Sponsor of Make Them Love You: CSO Partners | www.csopartners.org.in