Artist Schandra Singh's work is driven by an apparent need to foster frank communication in a time of palpable emotional uncertainty.
In of her critically acclaimed solo shows, entitled ‘If I'm Immune To It, I Don't Deserve To Be Here’ (Bose Pacia, New York; 2010), she had presented her large-scale works on linen and some smaller portraits. The exhibition offered an opportunity to explore the progression of this talented artist from her earlier works to the latest fantastically depicted oblige tourists floating down a lazy river.
She also had showcased a couple of her most influential early paintings for the first time - a large work of American founding fathers whirling in a rose garden and a meticulously detailed canvas of the World Trade Towers that survived her demolished studio opposite the towers. These two earlier works prompted the artist to contemplate over the variegated perceptions of communal and personal security and leisure.
Putting her painterly processes in the contemporary context, a curatorial note elaborated, “Within the history of figurative painting the choice of subject is always one of certain significance. And with the resurgence of representational painting practices through neo-expressionism, and even more recently, an emphasis on irony, satire, and the confluence of the beautiful grotesque has come to the forefront. Her larger than life images of tourists and locals lingering in the sun are a smart and well-formulated re-mediation of the Western fetishization of leisure time.”
According to writer Greg Tate, through her ‘obliquely satirical’ visual taxonomy of Western tourism, the artist wants to whisk us off to Paradise and then make us gasp in horror at the human debris wealth has deposited and left on display in her cold-eyed memory theatre’.
The art critic has noted: “What she compels us to look at instead is the queasy face of leisure and privilege on holiday. What she would have us side-glance at instead is the invisibility of the ethnic, the servile and the exotic in the eyes of beholders self-marooned in Paradise. Singh has redirected the gaze of our Occidental tourist selves from contemplation of our navels to complicity in our own vulnerability to dissipation.”
In of her critically acclaimed solo shows, entitled ‘If I'm Immune To It, I Don't Deserve To Be Here’ (Bose Pacia, New York; 2010), she had presented her large-scale works on linen and some smaller portraits. The exhibition offered an opportunity to explore the progression of this talented artist from her earlier works to the latest fantastically depicted oblige tourists floating down a lazy river.
She also had showcased a couple of her most influential early paintings for the first time - a large work of American founding fathers whirling in a rose garden and a meticulously detailed canvas of the World Trade Towers that survived her demolished studio opposite the towers. These two earlier works prompted the artist to contemplate over the variegated perceptions of communal and personal security and leisure.
Putting her painterly processes in the contemporary context, a curatorial note elaborated, “Within the history of figurative painting the choice of subject is always one of certain significance. And with the resurgence of representational painting practices through neo-expressionism, and even more recently, an emphasis on irony, satire, and the confluence of the beautiful grotesque has come to the forefront. Her larger than life images of tourists and locals lingering in the sun are a smart and well-formulated re-mediation of the Western fetishization of leisure time.”
According to writer Greg Tate, through her ‘obliquely satirical’ visual taxonomy of Western tourism, the artist wants to whisk us off to Paradise and then make us gasp in horror at the human debris wealth has deposited and left on display in her cold-eyed memory theatre’.
The art critic has noted: “What she compels us to look at instead is the queasy face of leisure and privilege on holiday. What she would have us side-glance at instead is the invisibility of the ethnic, the servile and the exotic in the eyes of beholders self-marooned in Paradise. Singh has redirected the gaze of our Occidental tourist selves from contemplation of our navels to complicity in our own vulnerability to dissipation.”
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