The mediums that artist Biraaj Dodiya lists for her 2020 work “Rising Smoke” reads: “wood, rubber tube, knee brace, polyurethane rubber, epoxy resin, duct tape, Magic Eye card with oil on canvas.”

Like many creators, Dodiya says she is “a little bit” leery of being pigeonholed by a brief, restrictive label such as, in her case, “abstract artist.”

“When I’m making work I’m leaning toward abstraction,” Dodiya says during a Zoom session from her home in Mumbai, India, where she’s preparing to present a virtual artist talk at 10 a.m. Monday, March 15, as part of Stetson’s Dr. Charles White Speaker Series.

“But I find the things that enter my art are from the real world, and my experiences in the real world,” she says.

To register for the talk, please complete the pre-registration form at least one hour before the event. If you do not have a Stetson email address, email [email protected] to receive the Zoom link. Talks will be archived and viewable on Vimeo.

Dodiya grew up in Mumbai as the daughter of two well-known artists, Atul and Anju Dodiya. In 2015, she earned her BFA with an emphasis in painting and drawing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and in 2018 she earned her MFA from New York University. Dodiya returned to Mumbai last year, and “Stone Is a Forehead,” her debut solo exhibition in her homeland, was presented soon after at Experimenter Gallery in Kolkata.

In recent years, Dodiya says, she has been “working with a lot of industrial and domestic material that has been discarded, and also extremely personal objects that I may have collected or saved from when I was a child, almost personal relics, these things which have lost their functionality. They have been paired with these domestic and industrial objects that have also lost their functionality, to create a new narrative.

“These resins that I’ve been working with, that are used as sealers and protective materials, I find are a strange and interesting thing — like how human beings kind of cover up or repair, this kind of quick-fix repairing of one’s self. It’s a kind of negotiation with loss and absence actually.”

Themes of memory and loss surface in her work. Her exhibit “Stone Is a Forehead,” for example, takes its title from the poem “Lament for the Death of a Bullfighter” by Federico García Lorca.

“I think it is because of a personal experience with someone close to me passing away,” Dodiya says of those themes. “But also I find that making art, that such physical activity is so material-based, so I was making these paintings and thinking about it deteriorating. Those things all came together: what life is actually about, the whole spectrum of strength and physicality and also fragility and complete deterioration.

“Once you start thinking about studio materials you start seeing those aspects, and also the systems human beings build up to cope with these things, like support, negotiation, this personal digging, this almost archaeological self-examination.”

Dodiya’s artist talk will focus on how “the physicality of working with material is a very important part of my work,” she says. “I’ll also talk about the freedom and self-doubt that’s so much a part of the creative process, and the idea of failure in the work and what it leads to sometimes.”

-Rick de Yampert

Dr. Charles White Speaker Series

The Charles White series was founded by the Creative Arts Department Anti-Racism Committee for Equity, whose mission is “to advance equity for and inclusion of historically underrepresented ethnicities and races” in the creative arts at Stetson.

Upcoming talks include:

• March 15 at 10 a.m. — Biraaj Dodiya. Cultural Credit will be available. Dodiya’s talk is co-sponsored by the Stetson Asian Pacific American Coalition (APAC).

• March 31 at 6 p.m. — Women of Color in the Arts, a panel discussion featuring Stacey Derosier (lighting design), Nadia Garzon (acting and directing), Erica Palmiter (performance art and art education) and Winnie Yoe (design and interactive art). Cultural Credit will be available.

• April 19 at 5 p.m. — Recording engineer Nagaris Johnson, Department Chair of Recording Arts at the MediaTech Institute in Dallas.

Please complete the pre-registration form at least one hour before the start of each talk. If you do not have a Stetson email address, email [email protected] by 2 p.m. on the day of the event to receive the Zoom link. Talks will be archived and viewable on Vimeo.