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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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Matter (Marg/Tagore), 2013
38 x 25 inches
Digital C Print

↓ additional info

I wanted to think about knowledge or learning not available in a library or contained in books. I decided to make images based on purely tactile manipulation — no composing (per se) — just a set of moves with bits of fabric and small objects: folding, bunching, brushing, shifting, squeezing, spreading, sliding, swiping, pinching, molding, swirling, twisting, fanning.

I revisited a beautifully written essay by Anni Albers called "Tactile Sensibility" in which she explains: "Matiere is the word now usually understood to mean the surface appearance of material, such as grain, roughness or smoothness, dullness or gloss, etc. qualities of appearance that can be observed by touch and are consequently not concerned with lightness or darkness. Matiere (ma-teer) is mainly nonfunctional, nonutilitarian, and like color it cannot be experienced intellectually. It has to be approached, just like color, nonanalytically, receptively."

Matter (ASI/Lothal), 2013
34.5 x 22 inches
Digital C Print
Matter (ASI/Nalanda), 2013
21 x 16 inches
Digital C Print
Matter (LKA/Ramkinker), 2013
19 x 13.5 inches
Digital C Print
Matter (Pras/AK/Jejuri), 2013
24.5 x 15 inches
Digital C Print
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