After I visited Divya Mehra’s exhibition The Finish of You at Evening Gallery in Los Angeles lately, an viewers favourite was “We’re Ready to Believe You!,” a 30-foot-tall inflatable Keep Puft Marshmallow Man mendacity flat on his diabolical white face. I’ve been following Mehra’s work since we first met in 2017 (full disclosure: the artist and I are pals and I wrote the press launch for The Finish of You). Divya and I’ve had many conversations about her artwork and its acerbic commentary on colonialism and racism, topics that have an effect on us each. Her large-scale works, just like the marshmallow man or the 2023 golden genie lamp sculpture “Your Wish Is Your Command,” entice audiences with their incisive humor and spectacular scale earlier than confronting them with violent histories of the subjugation and exploitation of individuals of shade.
However the works that resonate most with me proper now are a collection of small marker and watercolor drawings additionally titled The Finish of You. Radically reimagining cartoonist Skip Morrow’s 1983 ebook The Finish, a lot of the 5 drawings painting an individual of shade observing an explosion within the distance whereas White folks go about their enterprise, oblivious.
Divya Mehra, “A little HELP?!” from the collection The Finish of You (2024), felt marker, watercolor on 300 lb chilly press watercolor paper, 4 x 6 inches (10.2 x 15.2 cm)
When Mehra printed the drawings as postcards for the Wattis Institute in San Francisco in 2020, the tip of the world appeared nigh for a lot of, however the cherry purple explosions they depicted felt extra metaphorical than literal. Now they’re metaphors for the harmful repercussions of colonialism and systemic racism which might be all too actual for folks in Gaza and past.
A number of months in the past my mother and I noticed the Egyptian comic Bassem Youssef in live performance in Detroit, amongst a primarily Arab-American crowd (myself included). Youssef joked, extra brazenly than traditional I assume, in regards to the Biden administration’s fealty to Israel and the gang cheered in settlement. As a Michigan native, I’m positive that the democrats sealed their loss within the state months in the past, however now we’ve a bigger downside: a xenophobic racist president-elect who will nearly definitely allow Israel’s continued assaults on Palestine, and a quickly spreading struggle.
Greater than ever, I establish with the particular person in Mehra’s drawings: watching the explosion, helpless, because it threatens to decimate what might be Baalbek, in Lebanon, from the place a part of my household hails. Then I take a look at the drawings’ different figures, lined up on the “not-your-fault” middle. For a few of us, oblivion is at all times out of attain.
Divya Mehra, “Remember, say NO to discomfort, guilt, anguish or psychological distress.” from the collection The Finish of You (2024), felt marker, watercolor on 300 lb chilly press watercolor paper, 4 x 6 inches (10.2 x 15.2 cm)
