Statement

My paintings explore landscapes within ancient Indian philosophical frameworks and through the subject of icons, whose centralized representations across religions and cultures form a foundation for expanding the medium's possibilities as well as notions of Western and non-Western art trajectories. 

My work is filtered through my first-generation immigrant experience between India and the Western United States. It locates my practice as a site of disruption, fragmentation, and negotiation between my culture and identity. The rocky terrains of my native and adopted countries have become a generative site for investigating natural processes, cultural histories, and lived experience.

My landscape imagery is a composite of sketches and photos from my visits to various sites in the West, and from found imagery from digital promotional materials. My process is built, starting with a gestural underpainting of thinly washed brushstrokes that develop into mapping figure-ground relationships and building up imagery. The compositions borrow from the centralized compositional devices used in historical representations of ancient Indian icons and deities. In depicting landscapes as icons, my work negotiates cultures, natural processes, and geographies and their constantly shifting role within my creative process.