Artist Statement

For the show- IAAC 2009 Erasing Borders Exhibition, I am submitting a video entitled "Restless Portrait: A Disappearing Painting". This is a recent video completed in September, 2008.

This work seems like a perfect fit for the exhibit because it deals directly with the idea of erasing and the mutability of identity. The audio heard in the piece, a work entitled ""Rain On the Motherland" by Kazuki Mishima, was selected because the instruments used, including the sitar, reference my Indian heritage. The syncopation of the frenetic beats mimic the pitter patter of the brushwork as the canvas is covered in a drizzle of paint strokes.

This work engages the discipline of portraiture in a new and innovative manner. The impulse for this work stems from the realization of the static nature of traditional portrait painting. The half-smile of the Mona Lisa is frozen forever, and Juan de Pareja gazes out at us, as nobly as the day he sat for the portrait. I realize that I will never see Juan de Pareja blink, and it seems to me that that is the power of these paintings- their enigma and steadfastness. In painting myself, I have a sense that I am an altogether more neurotic person, living in a more unstable time, more twitchy and jittery. The video captures the painting of a self portrait on a single canvas, as the image is painted and repainted continually. There is a sense that a painting is never finished, that the act itself is somehow futile and that the end result is a blank canvas, simply more pock-marked and scarred than at the beginning, but just as uncommunicative.

This video simply aims to make all of that painting and repainting, all the searching, corrections and dried paint visible and explicit. We can see the process before our eyes, and draw our own conclusions. Using the medium of video, it is possible to capture the blinking of the subject. It is possible to capture the shifts and tilting of restless human beings and there is a sense of animation, where once all movement was only implied.

Although painting is thought of as a medium that celebrates permanence, and paintings live in museums and attics for hundreds of years, we are living in altogether more uncertain times and this painting video speaks of an era where paintings are destroyed immediately after they are created. I still have the canvas that is visible in this video, and I continue to paint new paintings on it.

1977 Born in Washington D.C.
1987-1992 Lived in Bangalore, India
1999 BFA from Boston University
2002 MFA from the University of Pennsylvania
2004-present Assistant Professor of Visual Studies, Butler University, Indianapolis, Indiana