IF YOUR COLOURS WERE LIKE MY DREAMS

By SHAGORIKA EASWAR

If your colours were like my dreams, red, gold, and green, red, gold, and greeeeen... I found myself humming the words to Karma Chameleon by Boy George as I wandered through When I grow up I want to be a namer of paint colours, Sarindar Dhaliwal’s solo exhibition currently on at the Art Gallery of Ontario.

Her multihued memories come vividly to life through watercolours, video work, embroidery, installations, drawings and sculpture, awash in hot pink, rich ochre, blood red and lemon yellow.

Southall: Childplay (2009) is a ten-metre-long digital print, depicting more than 400 coloured pencils. “As a child, I used pencils, playing cards, and scraps of paper with names written on them to generate intricate sagas. Years later, I collected all my pencils – four hundred or more – and arranged them by colour into a long row. Their physical attributes speak of their history. The wood is scratched, and the shorter the pencil is is an indication of how much I loved that shade.”

Dhaliwal’s poetic and deeply personal expressions are rooted in her childhood memories and experiences of migration, from India to England and Canada. Marking the artist’s first solo exhibition at the AGO, the exhibition is curated by Renée van der Avoird, the AGO’s Associate Curator of Canadian Art.

Born in Punjab, India, in 1953, Dhaliwal spent her formative years in Southall, England, before migrating to Canada as a teenager. At art school in Cornwall, England, in the late 70s, her professors scoffed at the bright hues she loved, encouraging her to adopt the minimalist style of the time. This only propelled her to embrace colour more. The collage-like composition that recurs throughout her practice likewise stems from an art education that ignored teaching her perspective painting.

Addressing both difficult personal and colonial histories, Dhaliwal relies on rich colour, materials and lush florals to create artworks that cast a critical eye while leaving room for wonder and imagination. “I do not want to sacrifice politics for beauty but to engage one through the other,”  she says.

The autobiographical tendency in her work, the poignant childhood memories and stories of a life lived between cultures, she says “is another way of saying I am a person – I did and do exist...it is the thread that ties my work together.”

Highlighting Dhaliwal’s significant contribution to Canadian art, the exhibition features 24 artworks, including several recent acquisitions by the AGO.

“Her art reminds us that the stories that we tell, our collective histories and autobiographies, are shaped by language, displacements, inheritances, scents, colours, allusions and misunderstandings,” says van der Avoird.”

Offering a revealing view of the artists’ own fictive paradise, the large works on paper that comprise her Zanzibar Tea Gardens series, highlight Dhaliwal’s love for flora and decorative motifs, as well as her meticulous technique. Everything inside and outside of this imaginary space, rendered in mixed media, stems from travels and dreams; doors in Brazil, the lemons and oranges in Cyprus, the mangoes in India, the trees in Versailles, a vase from Egypt.

Anchoring the exhibition is Dhaliwal’s immersive installation Hey Hey Paula (1998) featuring 544 red-tinted headshots of smiling women, surrounding a red rotary telephone. Under the intense gaze of these photos – all taken from the engagement announcement section of the New York Times – visitors are encouraged to pick up the headset of the rotary phone and listen to the 1960s pop ballad, Hey Hey Paula, with its lyrical refrain “I wanna marry you”.  

Reckoning with the horrific aftermath of the 1947 partitioning of India, Dhaliwal has imagined, in a series of eleven works, the fate of Cyril Radcliffe, the British barrister who drew the borders. In the cartographer’s mistake: The Radcliffe Line (2012), Dhaliwal presents a map of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh made of different-hued marigolds. In the cartographers mistake: Medicine Hat’s Reprieve (2020) Dhaliwal inscribes a wall with handmade clay letters, recounting an imagined journey by the titular cartographer – now transformed into a parrot – to Medicine Hat in 1910 alongside Rudyard Kipling (referred to as Sahib). 

In one work, Dhaliwal lists the many names we have for relationships, placing coloured powder in coconut shells next to Didi, Maasi, Mami, etc. “When I was small, my mother would say, call this person by that word. ‘Why?’ I’d ask, but she couldn’t really explain. Kids want rationale. I made that work in my 30s to fix that memory.”

When and where: Until January 7 at the Art Gallery pf Ontario (AGO), Toronto. More info and tickets at AGO.ca.