Joseph’s portrayals of village rites have a touch of the supernatural about them. The pictures follow the order of things, however. In one, a group of women prepare food. Some girls make music while others play with yard animals. Next door, a couple have sex awkwardly so as to not wake their baby. In the most striking image, women attend to the lifeless pale body of a girl retrieved from the cold river on another canvas. The night, finally, recognises despair and witnesses infanticide.
The troubling quality of these paintings could have something to do with the colour palette of vivid yet washed-out greens, oranges, and purples which Joseph broadly deploys to make up her scenes of invasive shadow. An even greater discomfort, however, arises with the viewer understanding that the devastation which Joseph recorded in her native Kerala is merely obscured by the gallery’s modernity. The latter offers us villagers no comforts.
