All In Due Time Artist Gloria Bhargava | Dynasty

I grew up within a confined community of international school students in the outskirts of Bangkok, where I was sheltered from the seediness, crime, and poverty that surrounded me. I studied under an American system, and I behaved like a Westerner. Essentially, i was foreigner in my own country. An yet at home I spoke Thai with my family, but I only spoke english with my closest friends. This artificial interposition is visually represented in the unlikely juxtaposition of the a veneer of American Dream combined with the deeper texture of the shanty-towns of inner-city South East Asia born of my daily physical navigation of the colorful Bangkok back-streets. The aesthetic result of all this is a perhaps surprisingly less distorted – but ultimately more creative and dynamic – understanding of the contemporary interconnectedness of the society today, comprised as it is mostly of a rapidly globalizing landscape of impressions and agenda-seeking impersonations.

In simpler terms, the iconoclastic dystopia of McCarthy-era Hollywood idealism set as it is against the backdrop of the emerging Asian and ethnic worlds strikes a particularly horrific balance. Traditionally, there have been two ways to capture this juxtaposition: to absorb it and internalize it (as the McCarthy-era depictions of the happy Ayrian family do), or to challenge and mock it (as many of the depictions of George W. Bush late in his Presidency did, with devilish features). There is, however, a third, more discomforting, but ultimately more conceptually truthful way to depict the message, I discovered – through collage. Collage gives an artist the ability to transcend time and perfectly recapture it in whatever contextualization of the imagination one wants. So for example, a baby crying can be a soothing image, transposed as it might be beside the picture of a mother, or a jarring, deeply disturbing image, if say, placed in the midst of the furnace of an explosive detonation.

By juxtaposing the Mad Men-era Hollywood idealism against the modern, widely celebrated chaos of emerging Asian economic prosperity, the confluence of these two politically-engineered images of wealth creation is so obviously aesthetically incomptabile that, once the two are conceptually understood/adopted as a unique, individual visual depiction that stands on its own, the lie is exposed as subtedly and as unconfortably as it became manifest: as nothing less than a dream of something that is inherently untrue. Meanwhile, the absurd and retrograde nature of garish representations of vintage Hollywood glamor, when reflected in the surface reality of the failed aspirations of many local Asian big-dreamers, lends a certain unbridled fidelity to the deconstruction of the strange combination of this beauty. Furthermore, the melancholy and the ridiculous narrative of material pursuit for its own sake that lies within seems to radiate from within the artwork as opposed from some other source, holding its very own interpretation of light (this is the ethereal, dream quality to the image that strikes us immediately as unreal). At once the delicate prejudices of classism and gender inequality are laid bare on display where ordinarily they are glossed over in other aesthetic compositions; almost synesthetically, one is confronted with the heavy draw of the psyche of those chained to these prejudices, which are exposed at once unmasked for their attempt to allure and appeal in the form of glamour and marketing. Ultimately, it is my intention and hope that my artwork allows the viewer to view contemporary society in a simultaneously objective and entertaining manner, neither condemning nor praising, but rather existing within the subjective realm that I have applied it contextually to. For nothing other than being an agent of this humble process of self-actualization and community engagement, I am proud to be a part of this artistic and social revolution.

Call For Artists

If you are passionate about art collecting and would like to buy this beautiful artwork, give our Los Angeles art galleries a call. Our art gallery is a wonderful place for art collectors.

Our owner and curator is portrait photographerLinnea Lenkus who has a passion for high quality art. Check out her latest art gallery in Southern California.