Randeep Kumar

Arts Tropical, 110 Meserole Avenue, Greenpoint, Brooklyn, NY 11222


Randeep Kumar - War Lumber (2003)
April 1, 2007 - April 28, 2007


Randeep Kumar’s photograph of a derelict warehouse in New Orleans is taken from the series God Respects Us When We Work But Loves Us When We Dance, first exhibited at Gallery Rivaa, NY in 2006. The series includes landscapes and portraits - all of which demonstrate both a poetic empathy to geography and place, as well as a distance and remove that might be characterized as benign aloofness.

Specifically, Kumar somehow balances the vast and the local in his photographs. For instance, Kumar’s photographs of Nevada (2003) depict both the surrounding, sublime Las Vegas landscape full of open roads and possibility as well as the interior back streets of Sin City. There are old pick-up trucks parked in front of complexes with copper green paint flaking off the paneled wood houses, seemingly abandoned motel swimming pools, single-wide mobile homes propped up with shoddy lumber, and open compounds set among dusty, horizon-less vistas. Emptied of people, Kumar invites the viewer to look at these places almost as if they were empty shells. Ripe with nostalgia yet undeniably anchored to the culture that inhabits them.

Kumar’s photographs of council estates in Ballymun, Ireland (2003) depict an aspect of Irish culture that is as inspirational as it is controversial. Interested primarily in the functional, yet strangely beautiful architecture, again what is missing from Kumar’s pictures is evidence that anyone lives there. They are entirely un-peopled and the images invite us to consider what these places are, encouraging the viewer to ask questions about the activity the structures contain. For example, Ballymun’s famous pony kids who gallop around the estates wild and unfettered. Shortly after the photographs were made, much of Ballymun has been demolished to make way for new housing. Regeneration initiated by Dublin City Council to address the abject poverty and state alienation that the area has endured since the 1970’s.

Similarly, Kumar’s photographs of New Orleans look at Louisiana’s inherent geography as well as its built environments to reveal its polemics. There are wet, mossy swamps teeming with lush if capricious ecosystems as well as houses that have jungles growing out of their roofs. Perhaps most emblematic of New Orleans inherent contradictions is Piety and Abundance (2003) which depicts a dilapidated house at the crossroads of two streets named: Piety and Abundance.

Kumar’s image of an abandoned warehouse, chosen for the inaugural exhibition of Arts Tropical amply demonstrates the contrary conditions set by Kumar’s photography. That such an abused structure can elicit so much poetry speaks of a certain time and place but also of an intermediate space between the cyclical machinations of destruction and reconstruction.
—Adam E. Mendelsohn New York, April 2007

Randeep Kumar is an artist working in various media. In summer 2007, Kumar is going to India to begin the process of building a renewable energy-powered home, and pursue strategies of escape from the violence generated by the Green Revolution.

Arts Tropical is the storefront window of artist Andrew Guenther’s studio. From April, 2007 Arts Tropical will exhibit one work by one artist per month selected by a guest curator.