A review of Hany Rashed’s toys
 
 
Courtesy: Mohammed Helmy (Medrar.TV)
 

For months now, Hany Rashed has been fascinated with the possibilities of plastic.

He tried, at first, painting on plastic sheets. But that didn’t give him the effect he wanted. When he heated the sheets over a stove, the colors melted. It was only when he started using a blow dryer that the work began coming together — the lines in his paintings stretched, and the figures he captured were distorted. The paintings were then put in casts and left to cool off, giving a sculptural feel.

The result of this experiment was a series of figures, vehicles and animals — details from Cairo’s street life and pop culture, which Rashed exhibited in May at Mashrabia Gallery and titled “Toys.”

In the gallery’s main room, the objects were wrapped in plastic bags and dangled from threads attached to the ceiling. Each bag was sealed and decorated with a uniquely designed label that read: “Imported by Mashrabia Company for the Arts.” The “source” was Hany Rashed, and the “country of origin” was China. The other room was lined up with different works put on wooden shelves. At the room’s center, figurines posed as if walking on a street. Entering “Toys” felt somewhere between entering an old, traditional toy store in Cairo and a museum. It was playful, luring visitors to circle the works, examine their details, take photos and perhaps shyly attempt to touch them.

Hany Rashed Toys

“Toys,” Rashed’s ninth solo show at Mashrabia, built on themes the artist has been working with for years. It captured individuals and interactions on the street, while keeping his personal views subtle. The technique Rashed used in building the work is also a development of his past experiments. A self-trained artist, Rashed is best known for his painting and collage works with a pop art feel. But for several years he has been recreating his paintings on cardboard and plywood cutouts of various sizes.

In “Street Scenes,” exhibited in the courtyard of the Palace of the Arts in 2010 as part of the “Why not?” group show, the characters Rashed painted were life-size. In his most recent installation, titled “Tahrir Square,” protesters, passersby, policemen and military soldiers were scaled down to the size of action figures. “Tahrir Square” was shown in May at The Station Gallery as part of the Red Zone Festival in Beirut. The installation offered visitors a bird’s-eye view of the square in early 2011. Rashed did not build a model of the square’s grassy island. But he recreated the dynamics of people in its vicinity and surrounded these plywood cutouts with reproductions of downtown Cairo’s graffiti and murals, similar to his presentation in the “Horreya” exhibition last December.

In his various experiments, Rashed has been trying out different techniques to “convert” photography into other mediums such as painting, sculpture and installation. He often carries his camera to shoot while on the street. He photographs people, stray animals, cars, buses and tuk tuks. His massive photo archive has been the inspiration for most of his recent projects. Rashed explains that he tries to keep all the details when he reproduces the images. His sees his artistic contribution more in terms of experimenting with materials and techniques. 

The materials were the starting point for the “Toys” exhibition. After several tryouts with heating and stretching plastic, he was content with the transformation it brought to the street images, and decided to show it to fellow artist Ganzeer, who described the objects as “toys.” 

Rashed admits that he did not see the work in this light before Ganzeer’s comment. But he liked the idea and began pushing it further, going on repeated trips to toy stores in downtown Cairo’s Attaba neighborhood. He would return home with different models, which he examined closely, researching their production steps from the initial modeling to the final packaging and window display. He bought the same kind of plastic used in the production of low-quality toys and added new designs to his painted objects.

These new works shifted away from public figures like TV hosts Tawfik Okasha and Bassem Youssef, whom he had focused on in the beginning of his experiments with plastic. He also started collecting low-resolution images from the internet and re-designing them to use for the packaging of his objects.

When preparing for the final exhibition, Rashed decided to include most of the artworks. He wanted to present his entire process with all its flaws and merits; he wanted to share with visitors how his ideas developed over time while working on the project. In the end, he framed the works through his artist statement as a commentary on the manipulation and confusion which the public, and particularly the middle class, has been experiencing over the past three years. But when visitors put this particular reading of “Toys” aside, the exhibition becomes a lot more exciting in its open-endedness.

In his next project, Rashed would like to push the idea and materials further. It will not be about toys, but will focus more on the visual culture of the Egyptian middle class on the street and even inside their homes. The results should be worth looking out for.

“Toys” showed at Mashrabia Gallery from April 13 to May 15, 2014.

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Mai Elwakil 
 
 

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