Honored to show this sweet little collaboration between poet Taylor Melligan and myself in an exhibition featuring my fellow alumni of Teachers College Art & Art Education. A Woman Alone, hand bound inkjet on Arista paper, 8.5 x 5.5 x 0.25” six poems / six illustrations. on view at:
Macy Gallery, Teachers College, Columbia University, New York
February 13- March 2.
Reception February 16, 5-7
Link to digital version of zine: https://express.adobe.com/post/qSBxRJ9G8WUyk/
Link to poetry by Taylor Melligan here: @desert.mallow
“[T]hey breathe in me as angels]” is taken from a line in the poem Integrity by Adrienne Rich (1978). I give form to private experiences and sensations in painting and sculpture. I am most preoccupied with the feelings that are difficult or uncomfortable to verbalize. Seeking a color, texture and form that embodies that experience provides me perspective on those sensations and the opportunity to peel my identity away from them. They have a life, an existence outside of me. I can appreciate their importance, their power, their beauty, their smallness. And then I can put them away. My confessionalist practice honors ugly, nuanced or difficult experiences. Each abstract landscape or figure becomes a jewel in the box of the psyche. Each carries its own memories. Each is responsible for shaping me. Each has whispered triumphs and grievances into my muscles and my dreams. In this box are confessions of that which makes me human and makes me whole.
LIST OF ARTWORKS
Panel 1
Clockwise from upper left:
Ipe, 2021, oil on canvas board, 8 x 6"
A Wild Patience, 2021, oil on canvas board, 6 x 8"
Parenting #6, 2018, oil on canvas panel, 6 x 4"
Untitled, 2022, ceramic and glaze, 6 x 5 x 4.5"
Jenny Linsky, 2021, oil on canvas on wood panel, 7 x 5"
Untitled, 2022, ceramic and glaze, 5 x 4 x 2.5"
Childbirth #1, 2017, oil on canvas on board, 6x4"
Parenting #10, 2019, oil on canvas panel, 6 x 4"
Return Home, 2021, oil on canvas board, 7 x 5"
Childbirth #20, 2017, oil on canvas on board, 6x4"
Untitled (Encounter 3), 2021, oil on canvas board, 5 x 5"
Untitled, 2022, ceramic and glaze, 8 x 4.5 x 2.5"
Panel 2
Clockwise from center left:
Parenting #4, 2018, oil on canvas panel, 6 x 4"
Parenting #11, 2019, oil on canvas board, 6 x 4"
Untitled, 2022, ceramic and glaze, 7 x 5.5 x 2"
Childbirth #22, 2017, oil on canvas on board, 6x4"
Untitled, 2022, ceramic and glaze, 5.5 x 5.5 x 2"
Parenting #9, 2019, oil on canvas panel, 4 x 6"
Untitled, 2016, oil on pizza board, 9 x 9"
Childbirth #21, 2017, oil on canvas on board, 7x5"
Parenting #3, 2018, oil on canvas panel, 6 x 4"
Parenting #7, 2018, oil on canvas panel, 4 x 6"
Untitled, 2022, ceramic and glaze, 5 x 7 x 3.5"
Parenting #15, 2018, oil on canvas on board, 4 x 6"
Panel 3
Descending from the upper left:
Puck, 2016, oil on canvas, 7x5"
Untitled (Encounter 1), 2021, oil on canvas board, 5 x 5"
Childbirth #34, 2017, oil on canvas on board, 6x4"
Megan, 2021, oil on canvas on wood panel, 8 x 6"
Untitled, 2022, ceramic and glaze, 4 x 5.5 x 2.5
Untitled, 2022, ceramic and glaze, 6 x 5.5 x 4.5"
Untitled, 2021, oil on canvas on wood panel, 7 x 5"
Childbirth #18, 2017, oil on canvas on board, 6x4"
Untitled, 2022, ceramic and glaze, 6.5 x 6 x 2.5"
Solana, 2021, oil on canvas, 5 x 7"
Orifice #2, 2016, oil on board drink coaster, 4 x 4"
AFTERTHOUGHTS
As soon as I leaned one of the 3 painted wooden panels against a shut-up doorway, a tall middle-aged white man walked from the bar next door to me. I chose to begin the conversation, "I was hoping to display some artwork in this doorway because it doesn't seem to be in use." “It’s our building,” he proclaimed several times. I asked if I could use the door around the corner for just 2 hours. It’s entryway was flooded with dust and debris. He grunted his permission. I served as a reminder that artists have made this a desirable location to invest in. Most passerby stopped to look. One visitor exclaimed, "nice show!" It was fun to install in an appreciative community.
I'm honored to show recent works alongside an inspiring group of artists who have welcomed me into the fold. The Cold Read is an email-based critique group lead by sculptor Kim Garcia.
please come!
a line and a long gaze
May 14 - June 2, 2022
Opening Saturday May 14, 6-10pm
Phase Gallery, 1718 Albion St, Los Angeles
Laundry 1 (pancakes ala mode, Sabrina's blouse, my leggings, Carlos's Corona tank), 2020-21, oil on canvas, 12x12"
Laundry 2 (poached egg on taters, Carlos's flannel, my blouse, Sabrina's tank), 2020-21, oil on canvas, 12x12"
Laundry 3 (beef stew, Sabrina's Simba leggings, my sundress, Carlos's shorts), 2020-21, oil on canvas, 12x12"
Laundry 5 (shrimp mofongo, Sabrina's tiger jumper, Carlos's pants, my skirt), 2020-21, oil on canvas, 12x12"
Laundry 4 (fishballs and okra over noodles, Carlos's T, my hoodie, Sabrina's sundress), 2020-21, oil on canvas, 12x12"
Sunday January 30th, 2:30 - 4:30pm
Sunset Laundry, 3812 Sunset Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90026
The body has always been my main site of research. I began these paintings as a joyful digression from my usual content. My husband sent me meals while I taught remotely in a cold three-walled shed in the Northern Bay Area of San Francisco, in the depths of 2020. The food lovingly prepared by my partner mingled culinary influences of our family’s diverse ancestors. It warmed my body, and I felt closer to my daughter who simultaneously ate the same food inside the sun-filled house. In that year, our daughter filled the large house shared by my mother and sister. Our daughter reinvented herself several times a day through anyone’s garments. I felt busier in the stasis of lock-down, and laundry swirled around our bedroom before I could wrangle it into the machine. I am part white, born and raised American and always wore American clothes. But in the only photo we have of Grandma Santh Kaur, she is wearing a pale saree. Within the creases and billows of a saree are volumes of personal and cultural meaning. Domestic tasks softened the seemingly endless mitigation of needs, boundaries, feelings, space and resources. Nothing is more intimate with the body than food and clothing. I extended the intimate gestures by painting them. Textures, colors and patterns swirl together, at moments representational, at other moments caricature. I avoided relying on my eyes so that the content could effectively filter through my emotional lens. Though I never strayed from the body, my painting process was delighted by a new easefulness and absurdity.
In a gesture of defeat, repose and longing Cora’s body and hair spill over a gray saw horse. Only her featureless head and slick hair fall onto the pale yellow disc like a spotlight. Her body is composed of bulbous warts inspired by the famous Peruvian super potato. Her bright green, brown and red tail is inspired by the velvety bean pods of mucuna pruriens, a medicinal plant that grows in my ancestral lands of South and Southeast Asia, is an aphrodisiac and antivenom
that has been used to treat a broad range of ailments for centuries. According to ancient Greek, Gaelic and Spanish languages, Cora is a maiden, a mermaid, a queen of the underworld and a puppet.
An icy white and blue tutu billows as though wind is passing through it from behind, though its bottom hem remains pinned beyond the edge of the canvas. White pleats of the tutu transform upward into two European beige mounds, which in turn transform into tan and then brown limbs reaching from smokey gray to gold to sun yellow. Hands of burnt tree branches spread across the top third of the canvas. Hajarah is the name of my Punjabi grandfather who arrived at the dock of San Pedro, California and made a family of European-Indian-Americans. On the second page of white supremacist, anti-immigration, anti-South-Asian novel The Camp of the Saints (1973), French author Jean Raspail
refers to a group of Indian migrants arriving on his French shore as mob of "Gandhi-arms" reaching out from their white “rags and saris.” Watching America experience a relapse of the sickness that is white supremacy, I find myself again contemplating my current and ancestral role as a white and brown woman.
Leaning back from a sitting position, a headless female figure is composed of a mossy, wrinkled neck, blistering beads, fragmented human flesh, an ant larvae and a porpoise tail. On an obsidian, prismatic pedestal, her presence glows against a hot pink background. In my experience, pregnancy is both deeply intimate—developing a relationship with a young human from the inside of my body—and simultaneously unavoidably performative—at a certain point the evidence is public for everyone to see. The new flavor of objectification I experienced as a pregnant woman alongside my personal, euphoric experience of pregnancy inspired Verónica.
A female form dances in the sky, in a state of physical and spiritual transformation. In the Bible, an unnamed woman (Martha’s sister) washes Jesus’ feet with her own hair. This painting is about a personal pilgrimage toward ecstatic empathy, and toward a sense of self that is divorced from feeling needed by others. Women are in a state of “being god” when they create life, art, community, or social change. In order for the future to be female, we must recognize women’s natural state as god.
Are you in Helsinki right now? I’m thrilled to have a precious little zine at the First International Festival of Manuports at Kohta in Helsinki, Finland. Showing alongside my colleagues of The Cold Read!
Thrilled to be a part of ‘Composing the Future’. Please visit the show at Bankhead Theater Gallery from May 7 to June 27, 2021 in Livermore, CA. Many many thanks to Northern California Womens Caucus for Art! @ncwca @bankheadtheater #womenartists #futurevisions
I am thrilled to show alongside fellow alumni of my alma mater! “Celebrating Bridges: Art & Art Education Program Alumni Exhibition” Macy Art Gallery Teachers College, Columbia University February 22 - March 19, 2021 Opening Reception: February 25, 5-7pm EST, 2-4 Pacific Time, (click here to register) Click here to see the virtual exhibition (starting Feb 22!)