Dina Gadia’s trademark graphic style lined with sardonic feminist humor is on view in her latest show at Silverlens Galleries with the title Convenient Culture Prop.

Dina Gadia’s collages and paintings are immediately appealing for their sense of cultural nostalgia, where the pull of sentiment adds to the perspicacity of her cautionary meditations on sexuality and prevalent social conventions. Her work is reminiscent of classic Pop Art that employs surrealist shock tactics of colliding images and texts to elicit unconscious meaning. Gadia avoids the common but rote gestures of photorealism, using instead a style reminiscent of bygone poster and billboard design, where the de-skilling of the painterly mark becomes a statement about the triumph of artistic sovereignty over technical alienation and commodification. Thus she exchanges mindless mechanical mimicry with the warm humanist cynicism ruminating on obsolescence. Dina Gadia spearheads this hardcore foundation for painting without giving in to languid and lugubrious attempts.

By appropriating found images from the popular culture of long ago, in which their curious juxtaposition altogether unlocks the blind romanticism of its milieu towards new discourses of historical insight and cultural discovery, Gadia henceforth provides the facility to explore sensitive subject matter without being doctrinaire, whilst further allowing wit in the initiation of audience participation. Such jarring combinations of disparate material and context, accordingly, allow unexpected associative interpretations that intuit unconscious social meaning, rather than simply signify already received ideas. Thus, it becomes fantastically unsettling when Gadia combines something that appears three-dimensional - such as a realistic landscape, with two-dimensional cut-out objects and figures that would then occupy the space. This contrast produces an alternative reality believable only in its irrationality, where paradox is the only ruling condition. Through this collage aesthetic, Dina Gadia creates a universe of codified lyricism.

Words by Arvin Flores