Dense, intricate, astonishing.
Rashmi Talpade’s exhibitions of photo-collages is at the Keyes Gallery from August 29 to September 22.
Join her at the library for an Artist’s Talk to hear about her work, her art, the inspiration and the process.
ARTIST’S TALK
RASHMI TALPADE
Thursday, September 11, 7 pm
ABOUT THE ARTIST
RASHMI TALPADE is an American artist residing in Wallingford for almost 35 years.
While her art career has covered various formats since graduating from art
school, her recent works are more focused on public art for which she has
received numerous grants and fellowships from the Connecticut Office of the Arts
and the National Endowment of the Arts. Rashmi has exhibited and done projects
all across Connecticut as well as New York, Massachusetts and New Mexico. Her
works are in the collection of the New Britain Museum of American Art and the
Roopankar Museum of Modern Art in India.
Rashmi’s urban themed collages explore environmental challenges faced by our
planet, where industrial relics merge with nature’s relentless march across
manmade waste. Her photo-collages, created by assembling hundreds of
fragments of her own collection of photographs, reflect our world in seemingly
ordinary objects. It is a narrative of our previous and current successes that, while
coexisting together, differ in many different ways. We are in the center of a
turbulent time in our history, where change is increasingly infiltrating lives of
young and old. Viewers are invited to engage with the works or they would miss
the details that reveal the optical play of visual depth and challenging
perspectives. It is also critical for viewers to stand back and maintain a necessary
distance to understand how the collages multiply spatially to create a complete
image.
The exhibition has four garden themes photo-collages, sized 40”x30”, which are
on loan from Yale New Haven Children’s Hospital (YNHCH). They were created
during Rashmi's art residency at YNHCH and was part of an Arts for Healing
program “Our Hearts Grow Wild”. The program was designed to foster resiliency
in youth and their families through therapeutic interventions and creative arts
experiences, to improve coping with their healthcare journey. The collages used
garden themed photographs, depicting the four different seasons, which were
collected from Yale’s hospital community and the patients and their families.
These photographs were then used by the patients to create the collages under
the artist’s guidance.