Instagram story viewer> @miradayal> Posts

Mira Dayal

@miradayal

4.5K

followers

3589

following

🌫
also @promptcolon

POSTS STORIES REELS TAGGED

Download All

Very happy to read @natychuk's thoughts on my show at @printcenternewyork, out now in @impulse_magazine_! Always a pleasure to see how someone else moves through my work and brings their own thinking to my materials. And grateful to @alexsantanana for bringing together my work with so many other artists I admire in the next show over about Parasol Press! My show will be on view through November 19—and stay tuned for a program in early November ✨ by @miradayal

183

3

4 days ago

Four more days to see my sculptures at @rainraingallery! On view are fourteen small sculptures, part of the "Other Compositions" series I made at the same time as my body-scale steel "String Figure" sculptures. All are made of mixed metal components that had been discarded, which I combined through simple methods into semi-representational, semi-linguistic, always allusive compositions.

Above them hangs a plasma-cut steel piece called "Phase Shift," which is part of my series of "Nets" (another piece is on view now at @printcenternewyork).

Many thanks to Rain for inviting me to show these pieces, @phil.z.cai for the install support, @marc_tatti_gallery_photography for the beautiful photos, and everyone who has come through so far! Closing October 10th. by @miradayal

73

4

5 days ago

Ten more days to see my fourteen small sculptures at @rainraingallery 💫 Part of a series called "Other Compositions," these works all use simple actions—folding, bending, pinching, interlacing, resting—to re-compose found elements made of mixed metals. I produced these simultaneously with my series of steel "String Figure" sculptures, but at a drastically smaller scale and with more intuitive decisions, and some of their forms and compositions echo each other. Arrayed across a long shelf to emphasize formal and associative connections, the works also suggest a scale model of a larger exhibition, hypothetically monumental. Images of the remaining works to be shared soon—I hope you'll go visit them 🌀 on view through October 10th! by @miradayal

162

10

11 days ago

The third new artist book I'm debuting at @printedmatter_artbookfairs is "Holes in Folds," a [big!] book partly inspired by spending a lot of time this past year with work by Howardena Pindell and Dorothea Rockburne. The book began with folding and then punching holes in large pieces of paper to create abstract compositions with partial symmetry across fold lines. I then scanned the paper and printed it to scale. The flat, unfolded pages are followed by scans of the folded pages, becoming more and more dimensional across the book. Continuing threads of folds, scores, nets, diagrams, voids, and scales.

A few more hours to grab a copy! Or DM me and I'll set one aside. Photos by @veryverylightcombat 🫧 by @miradayal

176

13

14 days ago

The second artist book I'm debuting at @printedmatter_artbookfairs was a few years in the making - "reCAPTCHA reader" stems from my ongoing (since 2020) series of ink-on-paper drawings of reCAPTCHA texts. To create this book, I began with an alphabet's worth of reCAPTCHA drawings, arranged in alphabetical order, and printed out scans. I then ran the scanned set through the Xerox repeatedly, to continually deteriorate the image quality, until the language forms returned to the static of the now-darkened page. Along the way, the words drifted toward the margins of the pages.

The resulting alphabet book refers to the original purpose of reCAPTCHA texts, being partly to train or teach Google's machine readers how to "read" slightly distorted words. This book echoes but intensifies the distortion of those source words, which were once pulled from actual scanned books, and furthers their decontextualization. The colorful binding elements channel the childlike context of learning how to read, while also resembling candy buttons, or the buttons of a digital device.

The first page bears a sentence commonly used to test typefaces, rendered here in a custom font I made from my drawings for an exhibition with @feralfile - in this context the relationship between the "quick brown fox" and the "lazy dog" feels like it maps onto the ever-evolving relationship between human and machine; here, the human proves their humanity via their literacy, but the machine then eclipses the human in performance on this test. Edition of 40; each one is unique.

Come join the other lazy dogs at the book fair this weekend 🦴Thank you @veryverylightcombat for the photos 🪁 by @miradayal

78

4

15 days ago

I'm debuting several new artist books at @printedmatter_artbookfairs this weekend! First up is "Sixty Sign Signs," a book made up of scanned configurations of sixty different language-like signs composed with vertebrae-like slices I cut from an actual signpost. The first page contains the loose letters making up the title phrase, which appears rendered in negative space on the last page. The book is enclosed with a rubber band. Edition of 30 ⭐️ by @miradayal

218

14

16 days ago

216

1

a month ago

I have a solo show coming up at @printcenternewyork, opening September 17! "Nets" will include a selection of works I've made over the past few years involving sheets of steel that I plasma-cut into mesh-like lattices, which are standalone sculptures that I also sometimes use as matrices for prints. These particular works I made at residencies at @oxbowschoolofart and @printshoporg, and at @dieudonnepaper.

Many thanks to @alexsantanana for inviting me to present work in relation to the concurrent exhibition about Parasol Press, the publisher established in 1970 that worked with so many artists who have driven my work, including Sol LeWitt, Agnes Martin, Dorothea Rockburne, Robert Mangold, and Sylvia Plimack Mangold. After having made work directly responding to theirs over the past decade, I'm thrilled to now have a few pieces shown in relation. Hope you can come see all of it! 🌌 taken in Print Center New York by @miradayal

327

30

a month ago

🩵 OPENING DATE UPDATED

Join us on Friday, September 18 for the opening of 𝘉𝘺 𝘌𝘢𝘳. The show brings together a selection of works by Lorna Bauer, Peter Brock, Mira Dayal, and Emma Safir.

The show will be on view beginning September 9.

More details soon.

@lornabauer
@peter_s_brock
@miradayal
@grem.jpg

#RAINRAIN
#lornabauer
#miradayal
#peterbrock
#emmasafir by @miradayal

406

10

a month ago

Sharing documentation of "reCAPTCHA_g_taped" and other works from my solo show this spring at 8-0-0 in Bangalore. These works are part of an ongoing series of drawings and sculptures I've produced since 2020. For a recent talk at @risdmfapainting, I wrote the following about this body of work:

What constitutes an image? When is an image readable?

These have been central questions in my practice. I began thinking about them most directly when I began a body of work about reCAPTCHA texts, these distorted words that you used to have to transcribe in order to make an account or otherwise prove that you were not a bot to access something on a website. This system is owned by Google. Now, we more often see the box-clicking type of reCAPTCHA test, but I was really interested in this early form of reCAPTCHAs where the distorted words were not randomly generated to be unreadable to bots, but were actually taken from scans of books that Google’s machine readers hadn’t been able to transcribe. So by typing out this text, you were participating in a crowdsourced effort to transcribe all of these books for Google.

The idea to pair these tasks came from Luis von Ahn, who later created the language learning app Duolingo. So these tests are very bound up in this question of how one learns to read, how one distinguishes text from an image, and at what point an image crosses over into language.

Working with these reCAPTCHA images for a long time, I was thinking a lot about the particular styles of distortion evident in these word forms, where the characters of a word are often pushed together, or curved along a vector, or struck through with a line, as a means of obscuring the word.

For some exhibitions, I’ve made site-specific installations where I project an image of a reCAPTCHA into a space at an angle such that it distorts the form, and then traced the silhouette of that form in tape, temporarily attached to the space, suggesting that something else might be placed within this temporary outline.

To be continued...! Many thanks to @upendravaddadi_ and @nihaal_faizal for making this happen - I'm grateful to have been part of the first year of the program.

#reCAPTCHA taken in Bangalore, India by @miradayal

165

10

3 months ago

I'm showing a special suite of works this week at @independent_hq with @spencerbrownstonegallery (booth 406)! I'm currently in Venice, so please go visit them for me ⭐️

Produced over the past few years in tandem with other sculptures, these pieces emerged from a lot of experimentation within and beyond the parameters of my recent exhibitions. Drawings, negatives, standard stoppages, meshes, engravings, inscriptions, still lifes, or low-relief sculptures, these pieces are freeform encapsulations of ongoing ideas.

"Scrap Drawing," steel, 18 x 24"
"Expanded Metal / Flattened Net," steel, 18 x 27"
"Folded Negative," steel, 24 x 24"
"Still Life with Tools," steel, 26 1/2 x 20 1/2"
Depths variable, all in custom frames. taken in Pier 36 New York by @miradayal

275

38

5 months ago

We hope you’ll join us on Wednesday, May 6, 7:30–9:30 PM at the Wythe Hotel (@wythehotel) to celebrate the launch of Nude Ascending a Staircase by Sam Lavigne (@samlavigne) and Georgica Pettus (@georgica), the sixth issue of the collaborative artist book series prompt: (@promptcolon).

Drawn from an archive of text prompts scraped from the generative AI platform Civitai, the project traces the strange gap between desire and its algorithmic rendering. These inputs—part smut, part source code—pair with images that never fully resolve, suspended as shifting abstractions: beige noise, kaleidoscopic forms, orificial buds, floating protrusions. The result is an open-ended vision of bodies in the process of becoming.

The evening will feature a reading by the artists, followed by a conversation on their collaboration moderated by prompt: publishers Mira Dayal (@miradayal) and Nicole Kaack (@kaackattack).

The publication is now available for preorder! If you’d like to pick up your copy at the event, use code PICKUP on prompt:’s website to waive shipping.

RSVP at the link in the @promptcolon bio

🗓 Wednesday, May 6, 7:30–9:30 PM
📍 80 Wythe Ave, Brooklyn
🍸 Complimentary drinks

Many thanks to Alessandra Gómez (@alessandrrraaa) for hosting us as curator of the Wythe Hotel Art Program! ⭐️ taken in Wythe Hotel by @miradayal

218

4

6 months ago