LOS ANGELES — Who’s afraid of the Keep-Puft Marshmallow Man? In Ghostbusters (1984), the bulbous, white mascot for a fictional marshmallow model seems as one incarnation of the villainous Gozer, a deity who taunts the Ghostbusters staff with a immediate: to “select the type of the destructor.” Artist Divya Mehra reincarnates that Keep-Puft destructor in her latest exhibition at Night time Gallery, The Finish of You: An enormous blow-up model lies, fallen, throughout one room beside blinking neon letters that spell out “DIASPORA,” its marshmallow-colored flesh glowing within the mild. This can be a “destructor” that, when summoned into view, flails humorously — even whereas sustaining a dominating, monstrous presence. Comically white and perpetually grinning, it varieties an apt, humorous metaphor for Mehra’s main topic: the British colonizer.
Mehra, who’s a Canadian of Indian descent, typically makes use of rudimentary machines to look at the inhumanity of imperialism. In “You’re Doing the Work (Diamond Jubilee)” (2024), a shaky robotic arm lined in beige building paper skates alongside a monitor nailed to 1 wall, clutching a brush. Just under, a big pink hand-knotted silk-and-wool carpet, formed to resemble the map of India, stretches throughout the ground. Once in a while, a ceiling-mounted pulley lifts a nook of Northern India, and the broom sweeps the uncovered flooring beneath. The work’s metaphorical conceit would possibly really feel heavy-handed — the colonizer, after all, sweeps its historical past “below the rug” — however Mehra’s bare-bones robotic efficiently satirizes the unfeeling gestures endemic to colonialism. The white robotic’s hand faucets its broom, nearly impatiently, earlier than mechanically thrusting its broom throughout the ground.
A white, haloed mild emanates from the following room, illuminating the silhouette of the Keep-Puft Marshmallow Man — however when one enters the gallery, the sunshine goes out. That is the magic of “Panorama Portray” (2024), a neon set up that spells out the phrase “DIASPORA” throughout one wall. As guests enter the gallery — that’s to say, transfer from the “homeland” outdoors to the “new nation” inside, in a miniature type of diasporic motion — they journey a movement sensor that extinguishes the phrase, rendering it illegible. On this manner, Mehra evokes one long-term impact of colonization, whereby diasporic topics exist inside international locations that always deny or diminish their presence, below management that compelled their displacement to start with.
Smaller works on view depict Mehra’s summary theses on a extra overt, human degree. In “Just a little HELP?!” (2024), a part of the five-part collection The Finish of You (2020–24), a brown-skinned waiter pours wine onto a tablecloth in entrance of a seated, White determine — presumably a vacationer, visiting a conquered state — as a result of he’s distracted by a pink mushroom cloud exploding behind her. Elsewhere, “Ann Winterton 2002” (2024), a 10-inch vinyl panel, recounts a darkish joke that ends with an Englishman throwing a Pakistani out of a transferring prepare in only seen white textual content. Whereas Mehra’s bigger installations pressure theatrical encounters with metaphors for colonization, her wall-based works show the identical violence actualized towards discrete our bodies.
In comedy, clarification is humor’s demise: “Don’t kill the joke,” the favored phrase goes. Fortunately, Mehra isn’t a comic, however a conceptual artist — the occasional obviousness of her work makes palpable the sometimes invisible equipment of historical past. “Killing” can be the time period for a profitable present: “you killed it,” one performer would possibly say to a different. At Night time Gallery, Mehra manages to do each.
Divya Mehra: The Finish of You, continues at Night time Gallery (2050 Imperial Road, Los Angeles, California), via October 19. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.