Trotter&Sholer and The New Other (Toronto) are pleased to present Between Standing and Moving, an exhibition by Jaspal Birdi. This is Birdi’s first solo exhibition in New York City.
Birdi’s work explores the tension of liminality. The in-between spaces can be exciting to inhabit, but they can also hold disquiet. Birdi’s process itself occupies a transitional space. She uses technology to work in and between the mediums of photography and painting. The results are images that are thoroughly investigated and layered and directed at a fuller sense of truth.
Birdi’s process begins with digital photography. She prints her images with a laser printer she has physically altered to spontaneously distort the images and produce them with the texture and grain which appear like handmade drawings or paintings. These images are scanned, enlarged and photo-transferred by hand onto metallic emergency blankets. Finally, she completes her tapestries by intervening with paint. Each step in this process opens Birdi up to chance, error, and discovery. She references Susan Sontag who suggested, “Photography implies that we know about the world if we accept it as the camera records it. But this is the opposite of understanding, which starts from not accepting the world as it looks” (On Photography Pg. 23). Birdi allows her camera to record the world, but she knows there is more to discover within the images.
Between Standing and Moving considers water specifically as a site of transformation and connection. Water is a free flowing life source, but it also often serves as a boundary. Birdi’s parents crossed oceans to immigrate to Canada in the late seventies. Born in Toronto, her own life navigated the realities of occupying both sides of a threshold. Ties between cultures and countries often feel fluid. Birdi’s work captures that mercurial reality as she explores experiences and images recalling water in her home country of Canada, as a temporary resident in Italy, and a visitor in the United States.
Between Standing and Moving will be on view at 168 Suffolk Street from September 12th through October 26th, 2024.
