2023 Solo Exhibitions: Cambridge Art Galleries

Two new solo exhibitions of my work have just opened at the Cambridge Art Galleries in Cambridge, Ontario, Canada.

Outerwhere and Cotton Exchange collectively feature three new bodies of work that are the result of over seven years of practice. While each exhibition stands on its own, both shows relate to the broader themes related to cloth, self, and migration inherent in my work.

On view at Idea Exchange | Queen’s Square is Outerwhere in which I alter and adorn the inner linings of 12 winter coats. The winter coat is the first-acquired and single-most important item of clothing for newcomers when landing in cold climates. Presented within a circle, Outerwhere shares stories related to diasporic South Asian experiences and themes of migration, identity, historical trauma, resilience, and memory.

On view at Idea Exchange | Preston is Cotton Exchange These works use the concept of image reproduction or ‘copying’ to focus on and disrupt assumptions related to the labouring bodes involved in cloth and garment manufacturing. In Cotton Exchange, I translate into painting an Art Deco bas relief sculpture found on the exterior of the historic Cotton Exchange Building in Mumbai. In Articles of Clothing, I reverse the process of fast fashion and the news cycle by engaging in a slow, durational process of drawing the clothing of protesting garment workers. By looking at the colonial period and present-day garment industries together, this exhibition illustrates the exploitation at the heart of what we wear.

The shows are accompanied by a short text by Dr. Natasha Bissonauth (Ph. D., York University) available on-site at both locations.

Outerwhere
September 30 - December 17, 2023
on view at Cambridge Art Galleries, Idea Exchange | Queen’s Square
Cambridge, Ontario, Canada

Cotton Exchange
September 30 - November 26, 2023
on view at Cambridge Art Galleries, Idea Exchange | Preston*
Cambridge, Ontario, Canada

*Please note construction on site, entrance is in the back of the building through the library
The drive between the two locations is 15 min. Google maps: Idea Exchange

The exhibitions are located in the town of Cambridge, about a 1.5 hour drive from Toronto. If you are making a day trip of your visit, please note that there are wonderful farmer’s markets in the area on Saturdays, strolls along the Grand River, and beautiful fall colours.

Rewilding the Body Eclectic at the Banff Centre

I am thrilled to have been accepted in Rewilding the Body Eclectic, a five-week thematic residency at the Banff Centre for Arts and Culture this winter. The residency is led by artist Zachari Logan and museum director Siddhartha V. Shah. I will be working with the figurative through conversation and artistic exploration alongside a number of other artists. This will the first time I will have the opportunity to actively develop my long-standing figurative practice in an environment of reflection and support.

The Dadi Principle by Laila Malik

A small but mighty publication was released in June 2023 by Hamilton Artist Inc., the location of my fall 2022 solo exhibition of Who’s Your Dadi?

Written by author Laila Mailk, “The Dadi Principle” offers thoughts and reflections on the Who’s Your Dadi? series of paintings.

Malik’s words resonate with searing insight into the position of paternal grandmothers in the hierarchy of South Asian patriarchy while also rightly affording them the status of “a lost council of elders”. Malik’s words situate the paintings beautifully, adding layers of depth and meaning.

Physical copies are available free of charge and by request through the Hamilton Artists Inc. publications page.

The Dadi Principle
by Laila Malik

Seemingly benign, Dadi is quicksilver.

At Meera Sethi’s exhibition Who’s Your Dadi (2022), we are invited in, gently immersed, and the boundaries between the real and the imaginary, the remembered, forgotten, and might-have-been are momentarily uncertain.

But this is not your mother’s Dadi.

Or maybe it is.

The Dadi is not just a grandmother. She is your father’s mother. In some patriarchies, this position holds particular meanings. It can mean that she has passed through various pre-set trials and arrived at the pinnacle of feminine achievement, which is to say, the mother of a son who has betrothed and begat. It often means she has finally earned the right to reign within her prescribed channels—as opposed to the other grandmother, the Nani, who must make peace—or war—with the so-called reproductive failure of bearing daughters, in whatever ways she can. Significantly, it can mean that the Dadi supersedes even the patriarch.

She can be the source of great affection, showering her heirs with rewards for coming to fruition. She can be the source of dread, punishing and policing them for interloping maternal genes. She can be the source of justice, keeping errant sons in check and ensuring they never do to their wives what may have been done to her or to others like her.

Sethi’s Dadi may embody some of these experiences. Viewers may catch glimpses of their own paternal grandmothers in the attire, expressions and postures of Sethi’s subjects—all of whom are entirely imagined by the artist.

But Sethi’s Dadi is also a coven. There is a powerful, quiet multiplicity, transcending class, sub-ethnicity and geography. They might not exactly be friends with one another, one a dream in pastels, poised on intricately carved wood, under an embroidered frieze, adorned in a delicate, eyeleted white cardigan, another cross-legged on the floor and staring directly at the viewer, her red and black mackinaw and hand-knitted orange balaclava seamless over a printed shalwar qameez, her bare feet unapologetic, the corner of a bicycle visible through the open door to the laundry line in the gully behind her. Every detail in Sethi’s textile and setting choices holds specific meaning and sends a unique message—while broadly culturally connected, each of these Dadis inhabits a wildly different world from the next.

Yet, they are nonetheless silently at work together from their respective perches, with pens and blank sheets of paper at the ready in each of their frames. These are weapons and warnings. They should instill excitement—and for some, maybe fear—because Sethi has convened a lost council of elders who are watching and taking note, connected by this material technology, always within arm’s reach. Across class and land and ocean, they exist as a collective refusal to be written out of the narrative.

With her characteristically subtle hand, Sethi has invoked a Dadi Principle.

This imaginational work is precious. The clamour of assertions about who we were and who we must become is cacophonous and filled with forces who would usurp and redirect these ideas to their own ends. Sethi’s question, who’s your Dadi?, is tongue-in-cheek and rhetorical as much as it is urgent and essential. Sethi is asking us, who will we choose, and what will we take forward? They are watching, the Dadis, counseling us to choose wisely, choose justly, choose lovingly.

Our futures hang in the balance.

2024 Pierre Lassonde Artist-in-Residence

I am thrilled to have been selected as the 2024 Pierre Lassonde Artist-in-Residence at the school of fine arts at Mount Allison University, Sackville, New Brunswick, Canada.

I will immerse myself in a research-based contemporary art project titled Guaranteed to Bleed that takes a long view of the establishment of the cotton industry in the Atlantic provinces. Through archival research and artwork creation, I would like to understand the relationship of the establishment of this industry to larger colonial, industrial, American Civil War, and enslavement histories of cotton. Guaranteed to Bleed will focus my interest on the ways textile is constituted over vast geographies and further my interest in the ways we understand and appreciate cloth, clothing, and the body, including it’s histories, it’s resonances, and it’s possibilities.

Dunlop Art Gallery Exhibition & NBNW Talk

Winter 2023 saw an exhibition of my work from four different series (Outerwhere, Foreign Returned, Yoga: A Sartorial Guide, Articles of Clothing) in a solo show curated by Noor Bhangu entitled “ritual intimacies” at The Dunlop Gallery, Sherwood Branch in Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada. It was a pleasure having work that spanned ten years all together in one space.

In the closing week of the show, Mriga from NorBlack NorWhite and I were invited to have a virtual conversation together about the shared themes in our work that covers both contemporary art and fashion.