Biography
Anujan Ezhikode was raised in a rural community, in India, where all aspects of daily life were intertwined with religious and folk rituals, which combined music, dance, theater, and visual art. This experience was further augmented by his training in the classical theater arts at the Kerala State Academy of Arts (the Kerala Kalamandalam). This background of vibrant color, movement, and images distilled in him and still appears as a constant residue in his work. Some opportunities that helped grow his artistic aesthetic in the US were a “Diverse Forms Artists Projects Regional Initiative Grant”, a “Project Studio Program Residency at Painting Space 122”, an installation for the “Mid-Manhattan library Art in Windows series” and a “Manhattan Graphics Center Fall Printmaking Scholarship”.
In 2009, he was one of six artists whose work and words were featured in an audio, video, and live presentation for the National Day of Listening at the NYPL on Fifth Avenue. The interview material is archived at the Library of Congress. In 2010, his solo show “Journey Through Broken Bubbles” was held at the UUFH Gallery in Huntington, NY and he was the featured artist at the Brooklyn Waterfront Artists Coalition’s show “Lineage” where he presented an installation, print and painting project, “Transparent Space”. Among the many exhibits he participated in 2011 were the Brooklyn Waterfront Artists Coalition’s show “Wide Open 2” juried by Nathan Trotman, curator, Solomon R.Guggenheim Museum and the Newark Annual Arts Festival’s Invitational Artist Exhibition “ IRONBOUND UNBOUND #2”.
He has exhibited widely at museums, galleries, universities, and libraries among them the Queens Museum of Art, Islip Art Museum, the Hammond Museum, JCAL, the Aicon Gallery, The Guild Art Gallery, the Twelve Gates Art Gallery in Philadelphia, the Visual Arts Center of New Jersey, and the galleries at University of Connecticut, Penn College, and Stony Brook University.
Statement
My work deals with cultural identity, displacement and memory. I am reinterpreting that familiar place which overtime can’t help but be altered and reimagined. As the past unwinds, there is a longing to reconnect. Connections once broken become retied and memories long hidden resurface. Color, images, and time all intersect with an absence of boundaries.
My earliest influences of Indian temple arts, folk and religious rituals, and classical music and dance fuels the narrative in my work. All of these art forms, especially my theatrical training, taught me the importance of having movement, light, and color in my visual vocabulary.
By using materials that also have history, whether layering image over image, working with recycled paper, found materials, or borrowed fabrics each contributes, in its own way, to this idea of the past unraveling. They bring an already existing personal imprint.
Flow and fragmentation, obscuring and revealing; my work explores the way we are confronted by a world that seems veiled to us. Words and images are hidden. We are well aware of what lies behind the curtain; it is part of our memory. You can walk through it, it is always visible…you are only adding your own new layers, one at a time.
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