Meera Sethi | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1975 (age 49–50) Delhi, India |
| Education | York University |
| Occupation | Visual artist |
Meera Sethi (born 1975) is a Toronto-based visual artist. Sethi was born in Delhi, India and immigrated to Toronto early in her life, her art sits between the space of diaspora and homeland. [1]
She received a BA in Fine Arts in 1998 and then gained an MA in Arts in 2001, both from York University. [2]
Sethi is a multidisciplinary artist whose research based includes painting, drawing, soft sculpture, illustration, social practice and performance. Throughout her oeuvre, Sethi looks at the meaning that people inscribe onto their clothing. Her research-based practice, delves into the intricacies of the history of cotton, the contemporary life cycle of clothing production from the growing cotton to the weaving of fabric to the labour conditions of construction of articles to the disposal of the clothing. [3]
Sethi's early projects Firangi Rang Birangi and Begum evolved as meditations on the fashion of queer diasporic people, paying special attention to the patterns, silhouettes and colours. These investigations are broadened to include figures, both imagined and based on real people in subsequent works. [4]
Sethi's Upping the Aunty was a [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] three-part project consisting of paintings, [10] street photography, [11] and an adult colouring book to celebrate the sartorial culture of the South Asian aunty. This project has been the subject of numerous academic studies. [12] [13]
Sethi's recent work has two separate but related strains. One strain focuses on the historical and contemporary conditions of cloth manufacturing while the other expands her figurative painting practice beyond the focusing on clothing and brings in her existing interest in domestic interiors. [14] In the Who's your Dadi? series, [15] Sethi picks off on her Upping the Aunty series looking at the space that paternal grandmother's hold.[ citation needed ]
In 2023, she had a two simultaneous solo exhibitions with two new bodies of work. Outerwhere series are twelve winter coats which have been made into soft sculpture of collaged textiles and found objects. Each of these coats tell a political and personal story woven together. [16] Cotton Exchange is a series seven paintings that reproduced a bas sculpture relief on the Cotton Exchange building in Mumbai, India. The original sculpture depicts the entire journey of cotton textile production in the early 20th century. Included in this exhibition was Articles of Clothing in which Sethi magnified images of protesting textile workers after the collapse of Rana Plaza. Through drawing, she reproduced the workers' textiles. [17]
In 2024, Sethi had a solo mid career retrospective exhibition titled Meera Sethi: A Brief History of Wear at the Varley Art Gallery of Markham. This exhibition featured a span of work from over 15 years including painting, drawing, collage, soft sculpture, performance documentation, and illustration. Sethi produced a second edition of Upping the Aunty colouring book for this retrospective exhibition. [18]
Her artwork has appeared on the CBC television shows Sort Of and Kim's Convenience .[ citation needed ]
 | This section of a biography of a living person does not include any references or sources .(January 2024) |
Sethi's work is held in the following permanent collections:
