Mira Dayal

Nets is a solo presentation of recent works by Brooklyn-based artist Mira Dayal. Primarily known for her "sculptural systems," Dayal works with various materials including steel, chalk, and graphite. Using physical forces like tension, gravity, friction, wind, and heat, Dayal's minimalist forms evoke larger organizational structures from the realms of cartography, math, and language.

Made during residencies and workshops at Ox-Bow, Lower East Side Printshop, and Dieu Donné, Dayal's new work adapts her plasma-cut steel "net" sculptures as printmaking plates. These works further the possibilities of printing without ink and explore the dimensional properties and allusive potential of unlikely materials. Dayal often records the objects' impressions using black chalk, or simply allows the pressure of the press to create embossments on paper. The resulting imagery recalls textile patterns, mathematical nets, spiderwebs, map grids, and expanded steel sheets. Dayal's work evinces the poetic latency of industrial materials.

Mira Dayal is an artist, writer, and editor based in Brooklyn. She produces sculptures, drawings, installations, books, and interdisciplinary works that create and iterate larger systems of meaning. Her works often respond to a site's architecture or history, involve subtle but laborious uses of everyday objects and materials, critically reflect on changing technologies, and expand the limits of language and image. Dayal's current body of work is a series of "language objects"—sculptures in steel and other materials that replicate and abstract tools and materials associated with the production of language and narrative. Research for this project spans from the ancient physical origins of written language to contemporary Large Language Models, and from geometric exercises to industrial fabrication processes.

Dayal has held solo exhibitions at venues including Yale University, New Haven, CT; 8-0-0, Bangalore, India; Fuller Rosen Gallery, Philadelphia; Princeton University, NJ; Spencer Brownstone Gallery, New York; Gymnasium, Brooklyn; Lubov, New York; and NARS Foundation, Brooklyn; as well as two-person exhibitions at ILY2, New York; Mehrab Bookshop, Kochi, India; Kunstverein Dresden, Germany; and Abrons Art Center, New York. She has also participated in group exhibitions at Rainrain, New York; Van Abbehuis, Eindhoven, Netherlands; the Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY; Feral File; Barnard College, New York; Miriam, Brooklyn; lower_cavity, Holyoke, MA; Parent Company, Brooklyn; Apparatus Projects, Chicago; Artspace New Haven, CT; Ochi, Los Angeles; Hesse Flatow, New York; Nurtureart, Brooklyn; and other spaces. Her work has been covered in Afterimage, Bomb Magazine, the Brooklyn Rail, the Chicago Reader, Frieze, Hyperallergic, and other publications. She has participated in residencies at Fountainhead, the Steel Yard, Ox-Bow, Art in General, and A.I.R. Gallery.

Dayal is currently Senior Editor at Triple Canopy and recently coedited Track changes: a handbook for art criticism (Paper Monument, 2023). She also publishes the collaborative artist book series prompt: with Nicole Kaack. These publications and her own artist books are collected by institutions including the Beinecke Library at Yale University, Barnard College, the Joan Flasch Artists' Book Collection at SAIC, the MoMA Library, New York Public Library, the School of Visual Arts, and the University of Pennsylvania. Dayal teaches at the School of Visual Arts and Barnard College in New York, and holds a BA in Visual Arts - Economics from Barnard College and an MA in Visual and Critical Studies from SAIC.