Chaff & light trash

A thesis show by Bhavani Srinivas
November 20–23, 2020
Hagan Gallery, 185 Nassau St, Princeton, NJ

Info

  1 Bindi mirror
  2 Your hair is eating too!
  3 Thalippu
  4 Imaginary friends
  5 Ikat printers and loom
  6 Pindam
  7 1008 coconuts
  8 Beep
  9 Happy only
  10 Light trash
  11 Pathologized Caslon

  

 

 


“Put the rice in, and run cold water in to fill the pot so that
the chaff and light trash floats to the top. Some grains of rice
will rise, too, but save them.”

—Edna Lewis in theTaste of Country Cooking

 

 

 

 
⧚ I quote the title for this show from Edna Lewis’ recipe for wild rice to surface my initial interest in overlaps, contradictions, and confusions between histories of South India, where my parents grew up, and of the Southern United States, where I grew up.
 
  

Bindi mirror

1
   
⧚ This work began as an attempt to create anthotypes, an early method for printing photographs. I printed images that are spiritually orienting: discarded flowers and fruit from Hindu rituals, spilled rice, and photographs of ancestors (some of them queer). I made dyes with pokeberries and goldenrod to savor the place in which I worked, New Jersey in fall.



Canvas, transparency film, pokeberries, goldenrod, sticker pottus, metallic thread, green marble gesso, beads, methyl cellulose

Your hair is eating too!

2
      




Velvet book cloth, silk and cotton fabric from Nalli 100, my hair, foundation, methyl cellulose, hair dye, collagen paper, turmeric, lampworked glass beads

 

Thalippu

3
      
⧚ Thalippu is a work about rice, a precarious machine to make ritual out of the foundations of South Indian cooking; Thalippu is the Tamil word for tempering spices.
 
A lamp heats hand forged copper vessels full of ponni, a South Indian rice varietal, and black peppercorns, and a plume of karuveppilai, releasing their scents. This work is a celebration of this foundational combination, honored with the ritual materials of copper and silk. But the work is makeshift, like Indian-American spaces for gathering and worship familiar to me. I also embed jokes about placeness. I am trying to recreate Tamil Nadu, but the ingredients are all New Jersey, much like the India I know is what my parents were able to conjure in America.
 
I went to high school near Charleston, South Carolina, a city whose wealth is owed to enslaved people who were forced to labor in rice and indigo fields. I embroidered kernels of the particular rice that was cultivated in South Carolina, Carolina Gold Rice, still within its chaff, onto the orange textile, acknowledging the violence that shadows a feast. The textile is a banana leaf, the traditional surface for eating meals, in Indian-made shibori.
 




Lamp, hand-forged copper, karuveppilai, milagu, ponni, Carolina Gold rice, wire, copper pipe, brick wall fragments, silk cotton shibori, wood, cotton, polyester and metallic thread, steel cylinders, indigo-dyed twine, wooden dowel, cardboard tube, spraypaint, steel square tube

 

Imaginary friends

4
  
    
⧚ A continuous copper pipe structure stretches across the width of the gallery, supporting the tubing of the fountains and suspending the yarns into the dye. The fountains are arranged along the copper spine, the carpet scattered to follow the flow of dyes.
 
Dyes are added to the water of four fountains. Yarns hang from a copper structure into the fountains, sucking up the color over time. I catch drips from the fountains on panels of carpet collected from renovations on my deserted college campus. The title describes the works in the show’s relationship to me; they are generated by me and very real, yet only exists to other people through my descriptions of them.
 
Each dye in the work has its own qualities—each differs in smell, viscosity, transparency, the texture of its foam and residue, and the sounds it makes while circulating. The scents are strong and grow rancid and the fountain spray, sputter, and splatter. This individuality and unpredictability is bodily, evoking bile, blood, and urine.




Fountain pumps, cochineal, madder root, pre-reduced indigo, osage orange sawdust, silk, yak and wool yarns, carpet, copper electrical wire, water, plastic trays, copper pipe, plastic tubing, copper refrigeration coil

 

Ikat printers and loom

5
   
   
⧚ The ikat printers are machines for printing on the threads in a time frame that overlaps with hand weaving. In traditional ikat, threads are tied and dyed; with this method, threads are painted with thickened dye from Imaginary friends. I loop four cardboard tubes, with a circumference equal to the width of the final weaving, through the handles of tote bags weighed down with cinderblocks and bricks. I wind threads closely together by rotating the tubes, then apply dye collected from the fountains to print a pattern.
 
I make a loom by hanging a copper pipe, draping cotton yarns, and weighing them with these yarns with stone beads. Then threads from the printers are woven two picks at a time to allow a continuous connection to the printer; the thread can be pulled and the pattern can be built indefinitely.
 
⧚ Read a manual for creating an ikat printer.




Dye from imaginary friends, cinderblocks, fragments of brick wall, plastic bag, tote bags, chemical dye, spray paint, cardboard tube, cotton yarn, copper pipe, pipe hanger strap, stone beads

 

Pindam

6
        
⧚ Hoarded objects, video of my mother and grandmother, residues of process, weavings made on a floor loom, and materials collected during travel, collide. Pindam is the Tamil word for a small ball of rice, offerings in Hindu rituals to feed ancestors.



Silk, cotton, and synthetic fabric from Nalli 100, Japan and Nepal, bookcloth from Firestone Conservation Lab, glass beads, spray-painted staples, paper towel, silk cotton, paruppu podi, oil paint, collected fibers, wood shavings, dye plant seeds, nastursium seeds, rust, plastic bags, hair, sticker pottu packets, paper, notebook, surya chandra, jewelry, bells, shalangai, PBJ sandwich, jar, linen, wool, cotton, nettle and synthetic yarns, keychains, varsity letters, woodblock, mussel shells, doll heads, sequins, leaves, projectors, cardboard boxes, aqua-resin, acai beads, Lloyd's Register project forms

 

1008 coconuts

7
    
  
⧚ I crocheted plastic-coated copper electrical wire, which necessitates a full-body scale of the technique, producing collaborative choreographies between the conductive wire and my body.



Electrical wire, plastic coated chain, rhinestone chain, raw silk, plaster gauze casts, cotton thread, raw silk, projector, video, brick wall fragments, steel frame, rubber tubing, leather, culvert drainage pipe

 

Beep

8
   
⧚ Beep is about the anxiety of harming others, but the inevitability of causing harm. It refers to my deep fear of hitting deer, foxes, and raccoons on my drive to the studio. Beep is also the Tamil spelling for beef, and I remember the people killed by fanatical Hindus claiming to protect the sacredness of cows.
 
Wanted was an experiment in creating a structure out of chipboard and fabric scraps that is non-linear and sculptural. Made at Cholamandal Artists’ Village, the content of the book responds to my experience travelling in Chennai. I collage photographs of Chennai (in the midst of a devastating drought), WhatsApp messages from my family members, an educational poster of the Tamil alphabet, and the caste and class-obsessed matrimonial ads in The Hindu newspaper.
 
In Please close the door, while re-teaching myself how to read and write Tamil, I dwell on the shame of forgetting the language my family speaks and the joy of beginning to understand. The title is the warning that the elevator in my grandmother’s apartment complex would chime in English and Tamil. A mylar foldout holds the writing exercises I used to re-learn. I interpret the experience by assembling images with images and objects collected on trips to India, notes scribbled in Tamil and Devanagari in my childhood and college notes, memes, texts from my mother and grandmother, and zooms into my practice pages.



Artist books: Please close the door and Wanted, electrical wire, wool yarn, leather, culvert drainage pipe, screws

 

Happy only

9
    
Eversilver engraved by Tamil Arasu. Carpet woven under the instruction of Prasida Chavan.


Stainless steel tumblers and dabaras from Ratna Stores, cotton yarn

 

Light trash

10
    
⧚ I remix previous works and fragments, surfacing the questions that linger and the meanings that have shifted over time. The work is grounded with a carpet from renovations in the building, a nod to the space and its changes and the non-neutral of a gallery at an institution like Princeton.



Lampworked glass, charcoal, sticker pottus, plaster casts, kolam powder, glitter, dragon skin, aluminum foil, duct tape, wooden dowel and block, alginate, silk, indigo, cochineal, walnut hulls, cotton yarn, chemical dye, hand-forged copper, steel wire, fork, foam, carpet

 

Pathologized Caslon

11

 

This website is typeset in Pathologized Caslon, a distortion of the semibold weight of Carol Twombly's Adobe Caslon Pro that I made for Art Hx.

 

 

 





⧚ Introduction to the critique by Megan Pai

Chaff & light trash is a thesis show by Bhavani Srinivas. Chaff & light trash was installed from November 20–23, 2020 in Hagan Gallery at 185 Nassau Street, the building that houses Princeton University's Program in Visual Arts.

Hagan Gallery and Princeton University occupy the unceded traditional territory of the Nanticoke Lenni-Lenape Tribal Nation.

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 Documentation was photographed by Megan Pai, Victor Guan, and T.R. Srinivas.

I thank my advisors, Martha Friedman, David Reinfurt, and Anna Arabindan-Kesson, as well as James Welling, Laura Coombs, and MJ Daines for their generous advice. I am also grateful to the staff at 185, especially Nick Sharpe and Orlando Murgado, Eric Li, Eli Berman, Somi Jun, MC Otani, Ariane Fong, Sharon Musa, Sophie Wheeler, Cammie Lee, Victor Guan, Megan Pai, Jhor van der Horst, Janette Lu, and Gaby Pollner, and my parents, grandparents, and brothers for their support.
⧚ ⧚ View a pdf version of Chaff & light trash.
 
⧚ See the process of making this website in an are.na presentation.