Sarindar Dhaliwal weaves words and colour together in show at Art Gallery of Ontario

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In 2010, the Indo-Canadian artist Sarindar Dhaliwal painted a chart of colour samples from “bottle green” through “mandala claret” to “lavender’s blue” and called the work When I grow up I want to be a namer of paint colours. That is the title for a retrospective of her work now showing at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto and it’s a revealing one: Dhaliwal doesn’t just specialize in colours, but also in words. She is a storyteller as much as a visual artist.

Take, for example, Punjabi Sheets #3: Birbansian, 1953, a large work that features a text written out in red oil stick on a chalkboard that wraps around a corner. The bottom is finished off with a thin ledge that holds a long row of eggs in various colours arranged by descending size. The text describes a sickly baby whose mother and aunt are going from village to village, doctor to doctor, desperately seeking a cure when a tinker tells them to place a freshly laid egg in the road. When it is crushed by a cart or bicycle, the baby will recover.

In a quote accompanying the work, Dhaliwal reveals that, yes, she was that sickly baby, but she also speaks to an immigrant’s ambivalence about home and away: In the end the child that was saved leaves the family.

This is the most autobiographical and overtly narrative work in the retrospective – and, tellingly, it doesn’t reveal if the egg is crushed. But in a show of riotous colours and fantastical tales, Dhaliwal returns again and again to the land of her birth, to the legacy of colonialism there, and to themes of migration and cultural displacement in the West.

She was born in the village of Bir Bansian in Punjab, moved to London’s Southall neighbourhood (sometimes known as Little Punjab) at age 4 and then finally to small-town Ontario at 15. She returned to art school in Britain, where her love of bright colours and desire to learn to paint flummoxed her modernist teachers. She then continued her graduate education in Canada and established her career here.

Words and colours are closely associated in Dhaliwal’s mind, apparently since childhood. The green fairy storybook of 2009 is a set of leather-bound books in a rainbow of green, orange, yellow, purple, blue and red, with an embossed text that has to be read from left to right across their wide spines. It describes a little girl sitting in a public library delighting in all the colours of the books and the promise of their stories, establishing a lifelong love of exotic shades and fanciful narratives.

But if these saturated colours – hot pink, lemon yellow, deep purple – bring much delight into the gallery, it is part of Dhaliwal’s effort to address deep sorrow. Another text piece, this time using embroidery, offers a particularly difficult example of the potential cultural clashes in the immigrant experience.

In The First Wedding, just created this year, the artist describes a wedding she attended as a girl in Southall where a 16-year-old bride brought from India was marrying a man she had never met – Dhaliwal’s “emotionally unstable” cousin. The family wants a wife and children for the man, but the shocked child keeps asking her mother: “What will she do when she sees his face?”

Writing in carefully stitched black letters surrounded by a floral border, Dhaliwal says that this recognition of a patriarchal culture’s unfairness to women permanently shaped her relationship toward her extended family and the rest of the world.

At the AGO, curator Renée van der Avoird juxtaposes this new work with a Dhaliwal classic from 1998. In Hey Hey Paula, she created a mural from 544 portrait photographs of women that appeared from 1989 to 1992 in The New York Times engagement announcements.

She then placed a transparent red filter on each photo, further eclipsing individuality in a grid of mostly white, smiling faces. If you pick up the red telephone sitting nearby, you’ll hear a recording of the saccharine 1964 hit love song, Hey Paula: “Hey, hey Paula, I wanna marry you/Hey, hey Paula, no one else could ever do.”

The arranged Southall marriage suggests an approach that is disturbingly cynical in its extreme pragmatism, but the romantic Western alternative seems delusionally naïve. Neither seems like the best deal for women.

Dhaliwal has also been addressing the colonial legacy in the sub-continent in a series entitled The Cartographer’s Mistake, a reference to the Radcliffe Line. That was the 1947 border between India and Pakistan hurriedly drawn up by British lawyer Cyril Radcliffe on his first-ever trip to India.

The results are infamous – 14 million people were displaced by partition and an estimated one million were killed in the ensuing sectarian violence – but Dhaliwal’s approach suggests Radcliffe was an unlucky person handed a bad assignment rather than a villain.

In the series, he pays the price for his mistake by being reincarnated as a bird. In The Cartographer’s Mistake: Medicine Hat’s Reprieve, a piece from 2020 included at the AGO, he is a talking parrot accompanying the colonialist author Rudyard Kipling to Alberta. (Dhaliwal created the piece during a residency in Medicine Hat.)

In this large text piece, the parrot’s narrative is impressively rendered in magnetic clay letters – there is so much magnetism in the room, the AGO has to warn anyone wearing a pacemaker – and explains how “Sahib” saves the town from the obvious mistake of changing its name to Gasburg.

Perhaps Kipling’s trip is yet another example of colonial condescension but the many thematic layers are getting so laminated here, it’s hard to parse the storytelling piece without more examples of the Radcliffe bird’s travels. (The only other one from this large series is the very first: a simple map of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh marked out with different coloured marigolds.)

The elusive nature of Dhaliwal’s stories, which so often lack an ending, is certainly purposeful, but here it becomes frustrating. Do tell me more.

It’s not the only moment in this exhibition when the viewer may wonder if it’s past time for the 70-year-old Dhaliwal to write her own storybook in a printed medium, rather than clay or thread.

When I grow up I want to be a namer of paint colours continues to Jan. 7, 2024, at the Art Gallery of Ontario.