Pradeep Dalal

PRADEEP DALAL

Pradeep Dalal is an artist and writer. His work was recently included in the exhibitions "Stories in the Social Landscape" at ICP, "Strange Invitation" at Franklin Street Works in Stamford, CT, "Picturing Parallax: Photography and Video from the South Asian Diaspora" in San Francisco and "Exchanging Glances" at Chatterjee & Lal in Mumbai, as well as: "Vision is Elastic. Thought is Elastic" at Murray Guy and "Fifty Artists Photograph the Future" at Higher Pictures. Pradeep has also exhibited at the Herter Art Gallery in Amherst, Aljira Center for Contemporary Art in Newark, TART in San Francisco, and Orchard and PS122 Gallery in New York. His photographic work is included in Blind Spot 43. Pradeep's essay "A Bifocal Frame of Reference" was included in Western Artists and India (Thames and Hudson, 2013). He is a recipient of the Tierney Fellowship, and holds an MFA from ICP/Bard College and a MArch from MIT. He is on the faculty at the International Center of Photography and the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College, and directs the Creative Capital | Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant Program.

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Samagri 1 (lingam family 1), 2019
16 x 20 inches
Digital C Print

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I am drawn to the interiors of architects' homes. I have had memorable visits to a few, but mostly I have visited via photographs in books. Several years back I had picked up a book specifically for images of the densely cluttered workshop-like home of Yona Friedman. On poring over the photographs again recently, I began to identify the vast number of village crafts from rural India — textiles, toys, drawings, dolls, masks, and paintings — that cover every available surface. There is a marvelous Phad cloth painting from Bhilwara, perhaps an epic story from the life of Dev Narayan, an incarnation of Vishnu. There is a lively Madhubani ink drawing of goddesses perhaps by the legendary Ganga Devi? And there is a mud brown and white Warli painting that may be by the great Jivya Som Mashe. The playful riot of color and texture is densely layered with study forms of geometrical grids, corrugated forms, and hoop assemblages. I was imagining that the newspaper wrappings in my Samagri series of photographs may have ferried these objects from India and easily taken up residence in YF's home.

Samagri 2 (lingam family 1), 2019
16 x 20 inches
Digital C Print

Samagri 3 (lingam family 2), 2019
16 x 20 inches
Digital C Print

Samagri 4 (hanuman disc), 2019
16 x 20 inches
Digital C Print

Museum Without Building installation at the EFA Project Space photographs by Yann Chashanovski.