UJWAL MANTHA

(He/Him or They/Them)

Ujwal Kartik Mantha is an interdisciplinary, multimedia artist whose work revolves around stories. He aims to be both a listener and storyteller with every piece he makes, paying close attention to the little and grand narratives we tell ourselves everyday. His work, based on his own experiences and the ones he learns about, oscillates between his own imagined worlds and the real social realities of his environment. He dabbles in a variety of mediums such as painting, sculpture and digital art.
He has participated in a number of exhibitions, such as the ACM department’s annual general exhibition and ARTSIDEOUT (UTSC’s largest one-day interdisciplinary art festival), winning awards for his paintings and sculptures.
Ujwal was born in Hyderabad, India in the summer of 1999. He is currently in his final year at the University of Toronto Scarborough doing a double major in sociology and the studio arts. His work often employs elements from both his majors. He is currently working on a project with Professor Kathy Liddle of the Sociology department at UTSC to create a Visual Sociological Dictionary that will be used as a teaching implement for first year sociology courses.

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ALL IS (NOT) WELL

Materials: Ink, Watercolor and Digital art

Throughout most of the 20th century, European miners would take tiny canaries in cages with them into mines. Being much smaller than the humans, the birds would succumb to any toxic gases or carbon monoxide found in the mines first. They would pass out or die and stop chirping, the miner alerted to the silence would know that it was time to leave the cave.
Whilst that practice has since been discontinued, the metaphor of the canary in a coalmine is still used today to talk about warnings and how certain events foreshadow disaster.
Today, our news is flooded with tales of forest fires and rogue hurricanes, erratic weather, and increased pollution. A basic understanding of science shows that these are far from isolated events. They are all choking “canaries”, and our world is descending into an increasingly toxic coal mine. For this work I intended to expand on that metaphor with respect to the environment by creating this comic book with the Canary as an unfortunate protagonist.

The Timid Hare and the Flight of the Beasts

Materials: Sculptural elements alongside watercolor, ink and digital art