LOS ANGELES – Who’s afraid of the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man? In Ghostbusters (1984), the bulbous, white mascot for a fictional marshmallow brand appears as an incarnation of the evil Gozer, a deity who taunts the Ghostbusters team with the command: “choose the shape of the destructor.” Artist Divya Mehra reincarnates that Stay-Puft destroyer in her latest exhibition at Night Gallery, The end of you: A huge inflated version lies, fallen, in a room next to flashing neon letters that spell “DIASPORA,” its marshmallow-colored flesh glowing in the light. This is a “destroyer” that, when portrayed, swings around with humor – even while maintaining a dominant, monstrous presence. Comically white and perpetually grinning, it provides an appropriately funny metaphor for Mehra’s main subject: the British colonizer.
Mehra, a Canadian of Indian descent, often uses rudimentary machines to explore the inhumanity of imperialism. In “You’re Doing the Work (Diamond Jubilee)” (2024), a shaky robotic arm skates along a track nailed to a wall while holding a broom. Just below, a large red, hand-knotted carpet of silk and wool, in the shape of the 1947 map of India, stretches across the floor. Occasionally a ceiling-mounted pulley lifts a corner of northern India, sweeping the broom the exposed floor below. The metaphorical conceit of the work may seem heavy-handed – the colonizer, of course, sweeps his history “under the rug” – but Mehra’s bald robot successfully satirizes the callous gestures endemic to colonialism. The white robot’s hand taps his broom almost impatiently before mechanically pushing his broom across the floor.
A white halo light emanates from the next room, illuminating the silhouette of the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man, but when someone enters the gallery the light goes out. This is the magic of ‘Landscape Painting’ (2024), a neon installation that spells out the word ‘DIASPORA’ on one wall. When visitors enter the gallery – that is, move from the ‘homeland’ outside to the ‘new country’ within, in a miniature form of diaspora movement – they activate a motion sensor that extinguishes the word, rendering it illegible. In this way, Mehra evokes a long-term effect of colonization, whereby diasporic subjects exist in countries that often deny or diminish their presence, under leadership that enforced their displacement to begin with.
Smaller works on view depict Mehra’s abstract theses on a more overt, human level. In “A little help?!” (2024), part of the series The end of you (2020 – ongoing), a brown-skinned waiter pours wine onto a tablecloth in front of a seated, white figure – presumably a tourist visiting a conquered state – because he is distracted by a red mushroom cloud exploding behind her. Elsewhere, “Ann Winterton 2002” (2024), a 10-inch vinyl panel, tells in barely visible white text a dark joke that ends with an Englishman throwing a Pakistani from a moving train. While Mehra’s larger installations force theatrical encounters with metaphors for colonization, her wall-mounted works depict the same violence manifested against individual bodies.
In comedy the explanation is the death of humor: “Don’t joke,” goes the popular expression. Fortunately, Mehra is not a comedian, but a conceptual artist; the occasional self-evidence of her work makes the typically invisible machinery of history palpable. ‘Killing’ is also the term for a successful show: ‘you killer’, one artist might say to another. At Night Gallery, Mehra manages to do both.
Divya Mehra: The end of youcontinues at Night Gallery (2050 Imperial Street, Los Angeles, California), through October 19. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.
