I arrived at art making after decades of concentrating on logic and efficiency. I focused on structured thinking and rational thought as a media industry executive and as a postmodern feminist art historian. Today, while I think critically about my identity and the effects of late-stage capitalism on our current condition, my practice is about a love of painting. Drawing on my South Asian background, while also challenging expectations of the model minority, I use paint to process my history. In response to our digitally driven world, I delight in the illogic and inefficiency of physical materials. What manifests in my work is a cacophony of my references to Indian miniature paintings, my fascination with color, and my negotiation of the tension between figuration and abstraction.
I metabolize styles, techniques, and references to manifest paintings that are temporal investigations of the history of art. I go back in history to pull it forward, address the cyclicality of time and examine my contemporaneity. I am particularly drawn to mythological stories, asuras (demigods with good and bad qualities) and animals. I use vibrant, synthetic colors and I infuse my paintings with subtle humor and a childlike sense of curiosity and wonder. With figuration, I am using allegory and parables’ ability to question the adherence to authoritative, powerful, and heteronormative structures. I find that abstraction creates a potent space for radical imagination. Moving between abstraction and figuration without a clear narrative throughline means that my work is an act of self-invention. This way of worldbuilding can be ambiguous and elusive, but it also can invite the viewer to engage freely and creatively in his or her own search for meaning and relevance.