The artist Amol K. Patil in Santa Fe Village, with its funky, plastered-over windows and lumpy floors. He explores caste labor and century-old chawl housing for Mumbai laborers.
Off-Sites: Santa Fe Village
I ventured to Santa Fe Village, with its broken-down-saloon gunslinger aesthetic, a historic building in town redone by hippies.
It was the perfect spot to find Amol K. Patil, a conceptual artist who divides his time between Amsterdam and Mumbai, India. “It has nostalgia,” he said of his space’s cracked walls, plastered-over windows and lumpy floors. The environment dovetails with his current work examining low-caste labor and the chawl system — century-old tenement housing for Mumbai laborers that is rapidly giving way to skyscrapers. One powerful sculpture evokes Dalit manhole-cleaners being lowered into dark water and looking up to see a circle of light, a task so onerous “they have to drink cheap alcohol to tolerate it,” he said...
