On Thursday, April 15th at 7pm, register and join us for our second conversation – And Repeat – with curators Ray Cronin and Lucas Cabral, and artists Paul Dignan, Sharmistha Kar, and Czarina Mendoza. These three artists all use repetition to shine new light on seemingly mute materials. With each act of repetition, Dignan, Kar, and Mendoza’s practices demonstrate the fascinating cycle of “work, work, work, and repeat”, as each new cycle lays the groundwork for added layers of depth and nuance within their practice. Repetition is a progression, and though the processes pursued by these artists, thoughts will be transformed into tangible things.

Sharmistha Kar is an art practitioner from India and currently living and working in London, Ontario. She holds an MFA from Western University, focusing on hand-embroidery. Kar’s early education began in West Bengal, India and later continued in Hyderabad where she pursued higher education in Fine Arts at the University of Hyderabad in 2009. She then pursued her studio practice as an invited artist at Space Studio, Vadodara, Gujarat, India returning to Hyderabad in 2012 to join the International Institute of Information Technology as a lecturer. She was awarded the prestigious Charles Wallace India Trust Award to do a three months artist in residence program at Newcastle University, United Kingdom in 2013. After her return, she worked as a visiting faculty member at Jawaharlal Nehru Architecture and Fine Arts University in Hyderabad. She was awarded with the Gold Medal for First Rank as an MFA, University of Hyderabad in 2009; and Dean’s and Chair’s Entrance Scholarships at Western University, London, Ontario in 2016, as well as the Graduate Thesis Research Award in 2018. Kar’s journey with hand-embroidery started as a student in Calcutta, India, and she has used that knowledge as a medium in her art practice, from 2008 onward, along with drawing and painting. She has exhibited in India, UK, the USA, Finland and in Canada. Kar is one of the artists involved in GardenShip & State which will open at Museum London in September 2021.

Czarina Mendoza (b.1991) is an interdisciplinary artist whose material-based practice centers around her fascination with exportable goods, inherited cultural memory and the mediation of transnational ties. In particular, she often returns to her upbringing in central Alberta which deepened her explorations of the permeable sense of home contesting rurality and communal associations of intergenerational care. While her work is informed by fragments of childhood and her family’s immigration from the Philippines, the hybrid result negotiates time and space that reflect the mobility of labour, objects and capital within a post-colonial world.