Who's Your Dadi?
Meera Sethi
- / James Gallery
Opening Reception: Saturday, August 27 from 2:00-4:00pm in Hamilton Artists Inc.’s ArcelorMittal Dofasco Courtyard
Toronto-based artist Meera Sethi pays homage to South Asian grandmothers through a new series of paintings entitled Who’s Your Dadi? Sethi depicts imagined grandmothers in environments layered with patterned textiles and other decorative motifs that signal to specific generations and geographies. Drawing on different cloth traditions such as ikat, kalamkari, block-print, mashru, and appliqué, the artist evokes an ancestral and cultural memory held in South Asian forms of ornamentation. Celebrating maternal figures and aging bodies, Sethi’s paintings activate the complex lives of a generation of grandmothers rendered largely invisible by patriarchal and colonial histories.
about the artist:
Meera Sethi is a contemporary Canadian visual artist with an interdisciplinary, intuitive, and research-based practice that moves between painting, drawing, fibre, photography, illustration, performance, and social practice. Her work lays at the intersection of the subjugated body and histories of cloth with a particular focus on South Asia and its diasporas. She is interested in the making, wearing, and disposing of cloth; the uses of clothing as a form of self-expression and resistance; and the ways textile is constituted over vast geographies formed through empire, racial capitalism, caste, heteropatriarchy, and settler colonialism. Through her work, she delves deep into the ways we understand and appreciate cloth, clothing, and the body, including its histories, its resonances, and its possibilities.
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