Suchitra Mattai
By Kate Meadows
It’s difficult to imagine that Socrates Sculpture Park, located on the waterfront of Astoria, Queens, was once a landfill. The illegal dumping site was repurposed in 1986 by a coalition of artists led by Mark di Suvero and has since transformed into a riverside haven. At the height of summer, the park is lush with greenery and teeming with local visitors. For the past several decades, Socrates has dedicated its five acres to exhibiting large-scale works, which remain free to access by the public year-round. Director of exhibitions and curator, Kaitlin Garcia-Maestas chose to devote the park’s 2024 programming to themes of migration, mapping and ecology as a means to challenge traditional notions of public art. She saw an opportunity for artists to mediate conversations between the landscape’s natural and urban features, including the park’s expansive view of the East River as it meets the Atlantic Ocean. Currently on view is Suchitra Mattai’s solo exhibition, We are nomads, we are dreamers, featuring newly commissioned large-scale installations that celebrate diasporic identity.
Mattai is an Indo-Guyanese artist whose interdisciplinary practice focuses on the archetype of the “other”. Her work explores the material entanglement of natural and artificial worlds, as well as personal and historical narratives of transatlantic migration. Mattai began as a drawer and painter and in the past several years has expanded to working across collage, video, sculpture, installation and fibre. The artist’s recent textile compositions honour ancestral artefacts and female domestic labour - her experimentation with methods such as weaving, stitching and embroidery draw from craft traditions passed down from her elders. Her incorporation of vintage saris, some of which are inherited from her family, further captures a sense of nostalgia and reverence for her South Asian roots. These woven tapestries have landed in collections of the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, the Tampa Museum of Art and the Nasher Museum.
Mattai’s only two-dimensional work on view is positioned above the entryway of the sculpture park. a pocket full of posies is a collage printed on a 10 x 28-foot billboard, depicting a circle of young girls dancing together. The figures appear to melt into a background of colourful ornamental blocks, which the artist has borrowed from the “Indian No.2” designs found in Owen Jones’s 1856 Grammar of Ornament, a design compendium that categorises motifs by global cultures and contextualises them within a history of colonial takeovers. As part of an ongoing series, Mattai reappropriates these patterns as a criticism of the text’s patronising compartmentalisation of Indian identity into cultural stereotypes. The artist has also included painted golden branches at the billboard’s edges, evoking the tree of life - a motif that introduces the steadfast generational bonds that inform Mattai’s work throughout the exhibition.
With a visitor’s gaze fixed upwards as they move through the park, one notices Mattai’s hanging sculptures nestled in pine, oak and beech canopies. Seven of these “globes” have been suspended from branches with rope and chain. Their surfaces are highly textured, having been tightly braided with vintage saris in palettes of fiery orange and ocean blue. Adapted for the first time in an outdoor setting, their connection with fruit fully comes to light: these are titled phala, which is a Sanskrit word that references the “fruit of one’s actions” in Hinduism and Buddhism. In her use of saris from generations past, one glimpses Mattai’s interest in the material accumulation of women’s domestic labour over many years, condensed into brightly-coloured, celebratory “fruit”.
Mattai’s largest work on display emerges at the furthest edge of the park, just as the open waterfront fully comes into view. Becoming consists of six sculptures facing one another in a circle, each turned in different directions as if capturing phases of a hypnotic, clockwise spin—an arrangement that perhaps recalls the dance in Mattai’s a pocket full of posies collage. Facing the sky with broad mirror-polished steel faces, the sculptures resemble bisected boulders, their organic shapes akin to continental forms. Sturdy and radiant, they seem like a more colourful version of Stonehenge. Their bodies have been draped in massive sari tapestries of gradually shifting hues, some of them 40 feet wide, crafted using weaving and embroidery techniques passed down by the artist’s grandmother. The tapestry’s edges ripple over and seep into the grass, occasionally flapping in the mild breeze to reveal the netting beneath.
Like the phala, this installation forms a mutable relationship with the park’s scenery. At this afternoon hour, the sculptures become powerful receptacles for the sun’s rays, refracting light both from their reflective surfaces and from shimmering patches of saris. Challenging the static qualities typically associated with monuments, Mattai’s becoming instead celebrates the adaptivity that is characteristic of her ancestors’ stories of migration. Also planted throughout the exhibition is a quieter homage to the artist’s varied cultural influences: A nomadic garden, which is a selection of flora chosen by Mattai in collaboration with the park’s horticulture team. Among them are turmeric, native to India and widely used in Ayurvedic traditional medicine to balance the body’s energy, as well as purple passionflower, used in Guyana for antioxidant and tonic properties.
The exhibition has also incorporated multiple dance performances by Barkha Dance Company into its programming—another unique means of maximising the venue’s potential as a place for celebration and contemplation. By connecting artistic narratives of labour and migration with the details of the park’s natural landscape, the spirit of We are nomads, we are dreamers indeed embraces Garcia-Maestas’ vision for Socrates Sculpture Park. The works here rivet together tree and fruit, sky and earth, river and ocean, gesturing towards a sense of cyclical transformation and belonging. Embedded within and readily activated by their scenery, Mattai’s commission celebrates meticulous acts of reclamation that feel both ecological and deeply human.
'We are nomads, we are dreamers’ organised by the Socrates Sculpture Park will be on view from May 11 - August 25, 2024.