‘Copy/Scan/Print/Repeat’

“Multidisciplinary” is a term often used to categorize artists, but it doesn’t feel sufficient to describe Pradeep Dalal, a Mumbai-born, New York-based multitasker armed with degrees from India’s Center for Environmental Planning & Technology, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the International Center of Photography (ICP). Incorporating approaches that are both academic and conceptual, Dalal’s artistic endeavors have employed photography, drawing, scanning technology and collage to explore modernist architecture, social issues, portraiture and memory. Describing his piece Go West, writer Nandita Raman commented on Dalal’s “DJ-like use of disparate materials on the flatbed scanner” to create a photomontage. In the statement for his Sala Diaz show “Copy/Scan/Print/Repeat,” Dalal references experimental photocopies artist Barbara T. Smith created in the 1960s, Seth Siegelaub and John W. Wendler’s 1968 publication The Xerox Book and his own process of xeroxing photographs, scanning the copies and then printing photographs of the scans. Touching on this practice of altering images through layers of reproduction, he asks, “Why should this rankle and what does it say about the fluid ways objects, books, bodies, and ideas circulate and recirculate through the world?”