Thursday, April 26, 7pm
@ the Asian American Writers’ Workshop
112 West 27th Street, Suite 600 (btwn 6th and 7th Aves.)
New York, NY
$5 suggested donation
An artist makes her work from a certain place, seasoned by her own perspectives, experiences, and identity. When the work is finished, she steps away, allowing a mild vacuum to draw the viewer in. The viewer, of course, brings her own background and applies it to the artist’s narrative. Please join SAWCC for our annual slide slam with artists Monica Jahan Bose, Asha Ganpat, Mona Kamal, Tara Kelton, Pushpamala N, and Sa’dia Rehman. Discussions may include gaps between perception and reality, configured identity, and being an individual within a group. This will be an occasion to explore the elements surrounding these amazing works of art and how they transition from studio to gallery. Wine reception to follow.
This event is open to the public.
Presenting Artists:
Monica Jahan Bose is a Bangladeshi-American artist, lawyer, and activist. Her work includes painting, drawing, printmaking, installation, and sculpture, as well as advocacy on women’s issues, the arts, and the environment. Born in Britain, she has also lived in Pakistan, Bangladesh, India, Japan, and France. Her heritage is both Hindu (father’s side) and Muslim (mother’s side). She studied art at Wesleyan University and Santiniketan and has a law degree from Columbia University. She spent five years in Paris, where she had two solo gallery exhibitions, an invitational show at UNESCO, and was one of 12 nominees invited to participate in the Prix Marin Exhibition of emerging painters in 2010. She has also exhibited her work in Bangladesh, India, Japan, and the US. She uses garments as a metaphor for the female body and spirit.
She now lives and works in Washington, D.C., spending part of the year working in Paris and Dhaka. She is an artist-in-residence at the Red Dirt Studio Seminar. She serves on the boards of both SAWCC and Samhati, a DC-based Bangladeshi women’s organization that creates small projects focused on ecology and literacy to empower poor women in Bangladesh. This summer she will launch a collaborative print-making project celebrating art and literacy with women from her ancestral village who have recently learned to read.
Asha Ganpat is a sculptor born in Couva, Trinidad in the late 1970s and presently lives and works in New Jersey. A descendant of indentured slaves from India and a United States immigrant herself, Ganpat exhibits an acute understanding of the ideas of home, of culture, and of identity. She received her BFA from Mason Gross, Rutgers University and MFA from Montclair State University. Ganpat has shown at institutions such as the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Insitituto di Cultura, Exit Art, The Noyes Museum, Seton Hall University, The Jersey City Museum, and the Nathan Cummings Foundation. She is an alumni of Aljira’s Emerge program and received the Best in Show award for her work in the Metro show at City Without Walls in Newark, New Jersey. In addition, Ganpat is an adjunct professor of sculpture at Montclair State University and Middlesex County College. This summer she will be exhibiting new work in the Figment Sculpture Garden at Governor’s Island.
Mona Kamal Mona Kamal has exhibited throughout Canada, New York, and India, including exhibitions at YYZ Artists’ Outlet and A Space Gallery in Toronto; Rush Arts Gallery and Exit Art in New York; and Gallery Espace in New Delhi. Mona has received several grants for the creation of her artworks through the Ontario and the Toronto Arts Councils. In 2007, she attended a residency at the Sanskriti Foundation in New Delhi. She recently curated an exhibition at ABC No Rio in New York and is a resident at the Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning’s Studio LLC program. Currently, she is faculty at Parsons the New School for Design.
Statement:
I build large multi-media installations through which I define the complexity of my migratory history, as I lay claim to India, Pakistan, and Canada with a North African birth. With the fragments of my known identity I piece together my culture and place of belonging. Through my installations I am literally trying to find my own place within my current locale while taking into consideration my family’s history. I create unstable narratives from utilizing architectural building materials such as concrete, bricks, plaster, and wood. The spaces I create are fragments of homes, as I am piecing together the bits of my cultural history that I know about.
Tara Kelton is an artist and graphic designer living between Brooklyn, USA and Bangalore, India. She received her MFA from the Yale School of Art in 2009. Kelton’s video, print, and web-based works investigate moments in which technology alters our perception of the physical world. She is currently working on an “isometric” video series in which interior spaces appear as they would without the influence of perspective. Kelton teaches at the Srishti School of Art, Design, and Technology and has exhibited her work at Vox Populi (PA), Franklin Street Works (CT), and Volte (Mumbai).
Pushpamala N’s work has been shown widely in India and internationally in venues such as the Tate Modern, Centre Pompidou, Singapore Art Museum, Bose Pacia, and Nature Morte, among many others. She is the recipient of many honors, including the gold medal at the Sixth New Delhi Triennale (1986) and the Senior Fellowship, Indian Ministry of Human Resource Development (1995-97). She is celebrating the recent opening of a solo show, The Ethnographic Series, at Kenyon College’s Gund Gallery. She now lives and works in Bangalore.
Pushpamala N began her career as a sculptor with an interest in narrative figuration and has transitioned into casting her own body as various characters and personae in the medium of photo-performance. Collectively, Pushpamala’s work engages with postcolonial theory and a feminist historical gaze. Her “photo-romances†and studio photographs seduce viewers through spectacular and elusive narratives. Pushpamala has been expanding her photographic practice into the medium of experimental short films, live performance, and sculptural tableau.
Sa’dia Rehman (b. Queens, NY) has shared her work internationally and nationally at venues such as the Jersey City Museum (2010), Grey Noise Gallery (2008), Exit Art (2007), and Queens Museum of Art (2005). Rehman was selected to participate in Artists Summer Institute 2011, a program sponsored by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council in collaboration with Creative Capital. She has participated in residencies at the Bronx Museum of Art (2008) and National Gallery of Art, Islamabad, Pakistan (2006). She works with themes such as isolation, shame, and hidden social boundaries, which are depicted through formal strategies like repetition of patterns and accumulation of words. Her installations, sculptures, and works on paper explore cultural assimilation and expose subjects that are considered taboo, such as sexuality, power hierarchies, and normative ideals around gender. Rehman grew up in such a community where these taboos were hidden yet aggressively maintained. Rehman received her MA in Art History and Museum Studies (2006) and is receiving her MFA in NYC. She is the Director of Bose Pacia, NY and splits her time between Manhattan and Brooklyn.
Photo Credit: Tara Kelton, Time Travel