Rashmi Talpade

Rashmi is a professional artist with a fine arts degree from Bombay, India with additional specialization in photography and ceramics.  Her work has been exhibited in prominent galleries in Bombay, New Delhi and New York as well as the museum of modern art in Bhopal, India.  Since immigrating to Connecticut in 1991, she has involved herself in the local art community and has been exhibiting her paintings and collages in numerous galleries in the New Haven and Hartford area. She is also a teacher of fine arts in Wallingford, Branford, and Middletown and gives talks and lectures about her work statewide.

Rashmi diversified portfolio includes creating works that combine two entirely different worlds – India, her birthplace, and America, the place she now calls home.  Bombay, now Mumbai, is all about crowds saturated with brilliant color and the city incorporates an array of detailed textures and sensibilities.  Rashmi captures the tightly packed, congested, and constantly active city which expands upward in her vibrant collages.  For all of Bombay’s westernization and colonial architecture, the eastern essence of the city is evident in her collages.  Her photomontages are reconstructed landscapes that speak to history, humanity, and cultural identity.  They comment upon consumerism and the daily trials and tribulations of life and ask the viewer to ponder their global existence.

To appreciate each collage, the audience must engage the work in minute detail or they will miss the optical play of the challenging perspectives.  After observing the details of the collage, it is also essential to stand back and observe the collage from a distance so as to understand how the work creates a complete image.

Rashmi has received a visual arts fellowship from the Connecticut Commission on Culture and Tourism.  She is currently the director for City-Wide Open Studios and serves on the Visual Arts Committee at Artspace in New Haven.  She also is a member of the Visual Arts Advisory Board at the Arts Council of New Haven.