The Thieving Magpie

Sunandini Banerjee, collects images from a wide variety of sources and creates innovative, humourous digital collages—a potpourri or a medley or a luck bag, call it what you will.

Sunandini Banerjee, much in the manner of a magpie, collects images from a wide variety of sources and creates innovative, humourous digital collages—a potpourri or a medley or a luck bag, call it what you will.“My main problem is that I can’t draw. At all. I can’t even draw a tree. The computer allows me to bypass that lack,” she says in a recent interview.  “Now I could juxtapose a billboard I saw being painted at Kalighat with a film poster with my mother’s wedding photograph with another image which reminded me of a moment in a Christie crime novel with an old clipping from a Reader’s Digest from the ’70s. I could finally put it all together."[caption id="attachment_21088" align="alignleft" width="380" caption="Rush Hour in Kolkata Image: Sunandini Banerjee"][/caption]Following her acclaimed first exhibition in June 2010, a brand new exhibition of digital collages by Banerjee opened this week at the Seagull Arts and Media Resource Centre in Kolkata.Created for the annual Seagull Books catalogue, this year’s collages are, unlike the large-sized prints of her last show, smaller and in the nature of contemporary miniatures. Banerjee is a Senior Editor and Senior Graphic Designer for Seagull Books.The show runs through 3 July, 2011 at the Seagull Arts and Media Resource Centre. 36C, S.P. Mukherjee Road. Kolkata - 700025.You can also check it out virtually at Seagull India.Here's a slideshow with some of Sunandini's collages: