Places & Spaces

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For this series, , I wanted to explore the relationship between memory and dreaming. I was working with photonegatives that are in their own way a distortion of reality. They are luminous, dreamlike, and ghostly, while also being directly derived from reality. I selected images from my family photo album that were structural and could lend themselves to being abstracted and simplified. I cut out the background of the images and replaced them with sheer material that came from found materials around my house, materials such as scraps of fabric from old sarees, that I like to use as a reference my cultural heritage. The fabrics I choose to use add to the sentiment of the work and allow me to create more complex scenes. The sheer material allows the viewer to see behind it creating a visual contrast between the painting and the fabric. The images become a stripped down versions of the photos, but I feel that they still capture the essence of the subjects. I replaced the figures in the images with figures made from string. I created the figures in the scenes by layering individual strands of string, of different thickness and color, on top of each other. They are a suggestion of a figure capable of shape shifting into anything desired. Like the way people in dreams are undefined to change into another being. These paintings play around with the interaction of 2D and 3D space.