In a beautifully petty story out of Brooklyn, NY, 25-year-old painter-cum-playwright Divya Singh has produced another series of paintings that are just thinly veiled jabs at her roommate, with whom she has a real passive aggressive thing going on.
You go, Divya! Don’t use your words!
The five-piece installation, titled “Dishes and Other Musings That Make Me Honestly Really Mad,” has made waves in a Lower East Side gallery for being very obviously about whatever beef Divya has with Jen Waters, her roommate of one year.
“This first piece draws inspiration from my childhood,” Divya lied, gesturing to a true-to-life oil painting of Jen leaving an unwashed cup in the sink.
“And this second piece is about my time in elementary school,” she continued, even though the second piece is very clearly a prelude to the other piece, depicting Jen checking to see if the coast is clear before she leaves the cup there.
Divya has subtitled the duo, “Stop Motion of Betrayal,” and has since refused to elaborate on this subtitle “in order to preserve the multiple meanings it may convey.”
All gallery-goers agree there is one obvious meaning: the dish thing.
“I wish she would just tell me that it bothered her,” said Jen of the piece. “I mean, I asked if it was okay that I leave my cup in the sink and she said, ‘OMG yeah don’t even worry about it, girlie!’ Imagine my surprise when I came to support her gallery opening only to find I’ve been shamed in pastels.”
The remaining three paintings are very large clock faces that show early morning times. The trio is titled “Awoken by Loud Roommate Sex Parts 1, 2, and 3.”
This is only one of many instances in which Divya used her art to make thinly veiled jabs at Jen. Six months ago, she also wrote a play entitled, “Hot and Cold and Never Enough for You,” in which two characters argue about the thermostat for 90 minutes until one gets a call from their mother and yells, “Am I not enough for you?”
“That was, word-for-word, a conversation we had last year,” Jen continued. “Also, it was kind of fucked up for her to bring my relationship with my mom into it. That was a private phone call.”
At press time, Jen confronted Divya about the paintings, and Divya said it was honestly vain to assume they were about her. Three days later, Divya wrote a short film about “one really mean girl and one girl who did nothing wrong.”
