Sarindar Dhaliwal
The collector of beauty
Sarindar Dhaliwal, “The cartographer’s mistake: The Radcliffe Line,” 2012
Chromira print, 42" X 42" (Collection of the Art Gallery of Ontario, © Sarindar Dhaliwal)
Sarindar Dhaliwal’s first solo exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto presents the provocative and colourful sprawl of her oeuvre from the last 40 years. On view until Jan. 7, 2024, When I grow up I want to be a namer of paint colours features reimagined maps, retellings of colonial histories, the beauty of hair, family stories, and luscious swaths of colour. The Toronto-based, South Asian-Canadian artist’s show features large installations, photography and several mixed-media offerings.
The title of the show is drawn from a large work on mylar that depicts a swatch of colours. Completed in 2010, When I grow up began in France and developed in Canada. The result is a poetic array of colours labelled using Letraset: “Belfast midnight” hovers over a range of three cool-toned pinks, while “sikkim” is a colour resembling red dust or a blooming love bite.
The artist’s work recalls the place-specific correlations between colour and name found in well known colour charts such as the Tate Gallery’s Colours of St Ives. Dhaliwal’s colour chart similarly delves into the personal with poetic intuition, while challenging the logic of representation. For example, “lime” is juxtaposed with a mellow sandy brown, while “canary yellow” hangs over purple squares. The corresponding colour swatches are certainly not citrus tones as the names may suggest. Dhaliwal often pokes fun at such limits of representation using colour, beauty, and the deeply personal.
The promotional image for Dhaliwal’s show, the first in the series the cartographer’s mistake, is titled The Radcliffe Line. It depicts the 1947 map of India in various yellow-toned hues implying Partition, the borders of which were drawn by an English barrister, Cyril Radcliffe, who had never visited India. The aftermath of the Partition map resulted in the second largest refugee crisis following the Second World War. The wall text notes that Dhaliwal uses different hues of marigold or “the rose of India” to create the map.
The yellow book from 2003 is composed of several large yellow books stacked seemingly haphazardly on a rough wooden table. Yellow paper fibres dangle beyond the edges of the books and from a distance it looks as though saffron is being pressed out from within their pages. The spines of the books offer inventories of yellow shades: ambergris, Indian yellow, jaundice, mustard, maple yellow, turmeric. Because her work challenges representation, particularly regarding our associations with colour, I was able to appreciate the colour as a medium in itself; it reminded me that colour is a gradient and that classification systems and naming create distinctions and different colours.
Sarindar Dhaliwal, “Southall: Childplay” (detail), 2009
digital Chromira print, 34" x 411" (courtesy of the artist. © Sarindar Dhaliwal)
Punjabi Sheets #2: Family Tree brings the typically ascending family tree to the ground in a series of relations laid out on the floor of the gallery and detailed on slate slabs resembling grave-markers. Beside each slab are fistfuls of pigment in coconut shells. This is the most sombre of Dhaliwal’s offerings because of its earthy colours in comparison to the rest of her work, which is bright and saturated. Like much of Dhaliwal’s art, Family Tree brings warmth to systems of logic and classification that can otherwise be brutal and inhuman.
Dhaliwal also pays homage to her artistic influences. An example is a mixed media work on paper, Oscar and the Two Fridas, 1991, comprising images of Irish writer Oscar Wilde and Mexican artist Frida Kahlo. In this work, Dhaliwal asks herself: “What if Frida Kahlo met Oscar Wilde?” Wilde was a protagonist in a short story Dhaliwal wrote and the wall text notes that she admires him for his ability to “turn ugliness into something transcendent.”
Beauty defines Dhaliwal’s vision across themes of identity, family, history, and migration. But “beauty” is never solely a matter of aesthetics, though a common understanding may lead us to think it is.
In Love Enough, a novel by Canadian author Dionne Brand, the character Lia asks what it would mean to collect beauty. She concludes with the specificity of beauty: “It doesn’t seem collectable. It’s fleeting. People can collect paintings, they can collect objects that may be beautiful, but this is not the same as collecting beauty. Collecting beauty would be remembering exactly, immersing yourself in the exact moment of an image or an act, and storing it in some synaptic folder in the brain to be called upon with the same effect as one recalls pain, for example.”
Dhaliwal is a collector of beauty. ■
Sarindar Dhaliwal’s solo exhibition When I grow up I want to be a namer of paint colours is at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto from July 23 to Jan. 7, 2024. Curated by the AGO’s Renée van der Avoird.
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