Living in Alicetime

Nalini Malani employs Lewis Carroll's fictional character Alice, to explore the interaction between women and their environments in her latest suite of paintings. Suggesting Carroll's infamous rabbit hole in this work, Malani cuts a fissure down the center of the canvas depicting isolated scenes in registers alongside the vertical tunnel. Removed from the confines of normality, Malani creates a world in which time and size are temperamental entities subject to change, where objects defy the gravity of description, and form is divorced from function. Refusing to coalesce into an organized and linear narrative, Malini tells a story which is made interesting through disconnected symbols. The figures reference both Kalighat pats and Manga comics, enhances the storybook quality of the paintings. In stark contrast to her recent foray into performance and electronic media epitomized in her zoetropic installations at the Queens Museum venue of the exhibition Edge of Desire, Living in Alicetime is a deliberate return to traditional artistic media.