Script
March 22 - may 10, 2025
Toni Onley Gallery
Raghu Lokanathan
ScriPT
The De-composition of Raghu Lokanathan
~ Paul Crawford
Raghu Lokanathan’s creative practice is a meditation on materiality, transformation, and impermanence. Over the past 20 years, his artistic journey has taken him from singer-songwriter to playwright, actor, and, most recently, visual artist. Over this time, he has taken on the role of cultural anthropologist, approaching his creative practice as a space for inquiry, layering different disciplines to explore the naturally evolving nature of objects, stories, and identities.
His work increasingly draws its inspiration from the discarded remnants of a society fueled by consumerism, convenience, and disposability. Through these cast-off fragments, he seeks meaning, understanding, and connection, exploring the trace DNA of our collective presence, though language and mark making while creating space for reflection, interpretation and understanding.
At the heart of his practice is an engagement with decomposition, both literal and metaphorical. Blending his interests in literature, mythology, text, and mark-making, he examines what is lost, what lingers, and what transforms over time. Found objects, often discarded, overlooked, or abandoned, become focal points for reflection and experimentation, raising questions about memory, value, and impermanence. Through these materials, he reveals the tension between permanence and decay, tracing how meaning shifts as objects pass through different hands, places, and histories.
By working with discarded materials, Lokanathan challenges assumptions about waste and worth. His process, tracing, sketching, arranging, and performing, is open-ended, reflecting the fluid nature of meaning itself. Through mark-making and text, both real and imagined, he explores how time, touch, history, memory, and interaction shape materials and ideas alike. The result is a body of work that resists finality, embracing the constant state of change inherent in both art and life.
This exhibition presents and frames Lokanathan’s work as an act of slow observation, providing an invitation to pause, recalibrate, and reconsider the everyday while discovering meaning in what is often discarded or overlooked. Through his explorations and meditations on impermanence, decay, memory, and transformation, he challenges our assumptions about waste and worth, inviting us to observe more closely, engage more deeply with the world around us, recognize value in the ephemeral, and embrace the beauty of change.
Raghu Lokanathan ~ Artist Statement
Sometimes the way I think about what I’m doing is that it’s the art I’d make at the end of the world- what I’d do if all I had left to work with was the scraps that are lying around that I have to squeeze every bit of material and use from. What I mainly use is scrap paper and scrap pens, because I see how to get started with them- by writing and making marks. Then I like seeing what happens when I trace one set of marks on top of another, then trace marks on one side of the paper as they appear on the flip side, then trace marks that then appear on the surface the paper is on, then keep doing that until the pen runs out, then take the pen apart and pull the nub out leaving a naked gooey inky plastic tube to drag along marks or press into or blow into marks or place so whatever ink is left runs out in a blob that spread and soaks what it’s sitting on. When I look at the results of this layering, though I see creatures, alien scripts and weather, mostly I find I don’t know what I’m looking at or how exactly to look at it, and that feels like a relief. A relief from sense, message, story, design, easy-to-see form. Other scrap materials I’ve been using are the unused end of receipt printer rolls and a folding knife I found last year in the Japanese Garden behind the Penticton Art Gallery.
Raghu Lokanathan ~ Biography
Raghu has been part of the BC arts scene since the early 2000’s when he got here from back east and started appearing at coffee houses and festivals as a singer-songwriter. He toured and put out albums as a solo artist, and also with bands including the Cottonweeds, the Chimney Swallows, and the Transfiguration Good News Band. You might still catch him on stage singing songs behind a guitar, but his work has also drifted into theatre and visual art. His short works for stage include Work(2015), A Sickness of Meaning(2017), Has There Been a Time Since(with Corwin Fox, 2021), and Cut Down(also with Corwin Fox, 2022). His first show of visual art was Object Decay, at the Two Rivers Gallery in 2018. Next was Observatory, an artist residence at the Omineca Arts Centre in 2020. Script is the third exhibit of his visual art.
