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Dots and dashes: How artist Madhvi Parekh developed her own language to tell stories of her youth

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Dots and dashes: How artist Madhvi Parekh developed her own language to tell stories of her youth Entirely self-taught, the artist depicts fantastical creatures, fables and divine beings in a style often compared to the Spanish painter Joan Miro.  Share  Tweet  Email  Reddit  Print From a distance, Madhvi Parekh’s early paintings look like Kantha embroidery. Dots and lines add up on the canvas to form whirlpools, waves, a stretch of road. These guide the eye to focus on the fantastical animals, mythological figures, trees, and people that populate her work. A new retrospective of Parekh’s works,  The Curious Seeker , at the DAG Modern art gallery in Delhi has 70 works made over five decades, and at least as many examples of how the dots and dashes foreground certain elements and give cues on how to read the work. In  King of The Water , a work from 1980 made on paper with pen, ink and glitter pen, for example, the dashes and dots are dense in the bottom third of the

Naturalization

His tongue shorn, father confuses snacks for snakes, kitchen for chicken. It is 1992. Weekends, we paw at cheap silverware at yard sales. I am told by mother to keep our telephone number close, my beaded coin purse closer. I do this. The years are slow to pass, heavy-footed. Because the visits are frequent, we memorize shame’s numbing stench. I nurse nosebleeds, run up and down stairways, chew the wind. Such were the times. All of us nearsighted. Grandmother prays for fortune to keep us around and on a short leash. The new country is ill-fitting, lined with cheap polyester, soiled at the sleeves. by Jenny Xie https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/naturalization

The Gift of Death

The Gift of Death : By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 11th December 2012 Pathological consumption has become so normalised that we scarcely notice it. There’s nothing they need, nothing they don’t own already, nothing they even want. So you buy them a solar-powered waving queen; a belly button brush; a silver-plated ice cream tub holder; a “hilarious” inflatable zimmer frame; a confection of plastic and electronics called Terry the Swearing Turtle; or – and somehow I find this significant – a Scratch Off World wall map. They seem amusing on the first day of Christmas, daft on the second, embarrassing on the third. By the twelfth they’re in landfill. For thirty seconds of dubious entertainment, or a hedonic stimulus that lasts no longer than a nicotine hit, we commission the use of materials whose impacts will ramify for generations. Researching her film The Story of Stuff, Annie Leonard discovered that of the materials flowing through the consumer economy, only 1%