 Thank you for having me here and I am going to talk to you today a little bit about my work across different media so I work in painting and drawing a little bit of sculpture and photography. I'm also going to show some images of the work as well as stuff that inspired me. So I was born in Brooklyn and I lived between Queens and Brooklyn until I went to college. My parents immigrated here from India and after I finished college I taught junior high school and high school for several years and then I went back to graduate school and then I decided that I can be an artist because there was a big question about whether I should or not because I wasn't... I think my parents weren't so excited about that as an option for my career so then I was feeling torn but then I decided to try it and I taught and made art together for some years and now I'm right now just working on my artwork but I'm sure that I will also teach again. So just to go through my work the image that you see here is actually drawn directly on the wall. So a lot of my work I do come murals. These are some of the first images that I remember seeing. These are from a calendar that was made in 1978 when I was three. These are images from TV shows about underwater sea life and I loved wildlife and nature stuff. So I'm just showing you a few things that inspire me and these are paintings for movie posters that I saw a lot of when I would be in India. So I lived there for a year when I was little and then I visited every summer with my family or every other summer depending. And the image that I'm showing you right now I don't know if you're familiar with it but this is an image of the Hindu goddess called Kali and she is supposed to be a divine force and one of the few images where you can get to see the goddess angry. So it's most of the other ones are representations that are more like the Virgin Mary where she's like come and say hello and but this is an image that also inspired me. So a lot of my work is interested in mythology and stories, fairy tales, folk tales. I like that because I like the idea of these stories that I read when I was a kid and I think they're very interesting because myths and folk tales and fairy tales are human beings way of trying to understand who are we, why are we here, what are we doing, where did we come from, what's right and what's wrong, how are we supposed to be acting in society and what's going to happen to us if we don't listen or we disobey the rules. So those are some things that I'm interested in about mythology. These ideas of trying to understand where we came from and also for me to think more about Indian culture and images that I had seen were some of the first things that I looked at when I started painting. So I was trained as a painter like this kind of painting and representational large scale oil and acrylic. The actual painting would be a little bit bigger than this. So most of my work is pretty large scale and these images are images that I found in travel brochures about India from the 80s and then I was interested in just mixing them up and putting them together in a different way. What I did was I also was interested in like I would cut pictures out of newspapers and magazines and a lot of my work came from clipping and rearranging these images together. So I worked in this vein for a while and then I moved to, I made a pretty big change in my work and I started to work directly on the wall. So it was still figurative and it was still about these ideas of mythology and I wanted to try to do something that I felt like was more free. Another thing that I was also inspired by when I was growing up was art that I would see on the street and the subways and things that looked very spontaneous. So these were some of the length like graffiti and line art drawings that you would see people did on the on doorways with stencils and these are some of the things that inspired me. Also the materials here like the red flowers and all of the stuff on the floor these are like items that you could find in a 99 cent store and actually the red stuff is stuff that people would cover their rug with. I don't know if you guys are familiar with that or your furniture would. So I wanted to use materials that are from our everyday life but in a different way and then you can see that it's done directly in the wall because you can see it's actually a room in a house because there's an outlet there and it was a fun project. So I got to do that and then I did two pieces where there's the inside and then an outside so when you stepped out you would see this. This is a huge gigantic underwear and it was inspired by a story that I read where there was a goddess who was enormous and really unattractive and had many legs and stuff and she needed to she really had a crush on the hero of this story so she disguised herself as a skinny light-skinned woman and then she started flirting with him and then he found out and then he chopped off her nose and her ears and her eyes and then it started this whole crazy battle story this epic but that moment where she tries to make an advance to him and he rejects it by basically like disfiguring her is something that we don't know a lot about in the story. So a lot of my work is interested in thinking about stories that are very popular in different cultures and then the parts of them that remain kind of underground or missing. So this is another painting that these are different kinds of paintings from the 20s and the 30s in India where they show things both mythological things like this is a god and a monkey kind of wrestling together and then this is a barber cleaning a woman's ear so I like to put together these are inspiring to me because I like the idea of very normal everyday things some of which we might even think of as gross and then really amazing moments like these two gods coming together and then this is actually an invitation for a cultural event that I went to but I just wanted to show you how these things are both in fine art and in really ancient art and then they come into everyday life. So this is another work that I did on the wall the text says wondering why she abandoned her armor like a monkey eating its own heart and these this piece as well as the piece that comes after it were inspired by this Indian warrior queen well she was just a queen and then she had to defend her land against the British but she was 19 so she was kind of like a Joan of Arc and they don't know a lot about her and then she died in battle so this was just imagining thinking about her and not about drawing her or what it really would look like but being inspired by some of the things that I had read about her so it's drawing on the wall this one would this one was about the size of this wall behind you like right there and the materials here so it's pen and ink and then the materials like these roses here are like roses you would find that I don't know if you saw the ladies they have like plastic bags with flowers on them on the subway and they're carrying their stuff this is these are cut out from those these are shower curtains these are the rug runners you know the thing you would cover your rug with wrapping paper marbles all everyday materials and what I hope to do is use stuff like this that you would have seen somewhere maybe not in an art context to kind of try to bring the viewer in and there's something that's familiar about it but unfamiliar at the same time so these were supposed to be like lily pads that's what that's a detail of so I use this material both on the wall which is this previous image here right and then I also started doing more works on paper but they have three-dimensional elements like these are eyeballs and leaves that are actually coming out of the drawing and then you can see the marbles and the beads and the glitter and stuff that is part of the work so it's like some it incorporates some sculpture and some drawing and then I was very inspired by working with kids because they love like younger kids who like to work with glitter and clay and bright things and so a lot of my interest in my materials also came from that so this is another work that's in that vein and this one is like 10 by 20 feet so this was at the Queen's Museum of Art and this is a detail of it and I don't know if any of you are familiar with the story of Hercules but so there's this part where he has to kill this monster called the Hydra did you guys anybody saw the Hercules like the Disney Hercules okay so he's got to kill the monster and he tries to chop its head off and then every time he chops his head off more heads grow so I was thinking about that in relationship also to like things that are happening in our world today like the way the way terrorism or crime or things like that or are fought and how they're dealt with and how just trying to deal with it with violence actually makes the whole problem grow and multiply so that was something that was in my head when I was making this and then I had to stand on a cherry picker which is a electric ladder when I was doing this piece and I had to go up and down because it was really high and then I was working late at night and then one night I got stuck on the top of the thing and then I had to slide down like I was if I was on a like as if I was a fireman or so I don't know that's what I imagine so and I actually find those parts of the work to be fun too so this is another mural that I did in Houston, Texas and this one is about 13 by 45 feet so there's hair in this work oh you can't see it there but there's extension hair that I braided into long braids with wires and these things right here are fishing bait that you would put on your fishing rod to catch something these are bicycle reflectors and stickers so it's more of the everyday material and the piece just wanted to talk a little bit about this thing on the bottom right here it's a line drawing and it's called a column there are actually some versions of it in the Caribbean too but what you do is you make that with flour and water and you put it at the front of your doorstep and it's supposed to guard against either the evil eye or kind of bless your house or keep your safe space safe so I'm interested in this because it's a line drawing also and it's also site specific which means that it's done in that place you guys probably know that but and it's done every day so once the day is over you just wash it off with water and then redo it and similarly a piece like this one that you see here once the show was over it was just painted over so this is the only version of that artwork that still exists I'm gonna show you some photography work too so this is remember the warrior queen I was telling you about two minutes ago this is actually me trying to make a representation of her because when I tried to look for an image of her this is what I found so in this one it looks weird they obviously did something to her neck and her face and then in this one she looks like an old guy and they're really different so so I felt like there was a gap there there was something missing and I wanted to try and recreate it I wanted to try and use art to fill in the gaps about history and culture that were missing for me so I made this armor suit with cardboard and tin foil aluminum foil and duct tape and hot glue and binder fasteners like those right there put your reports together with and then a frisbee and yeah that was it so this costume came and then I took this photograph which actually a lot of my photographs a lot of my work happens in Brooklyn but then a few of the photographs that I'm showing you are taken in Prospect Park such as this one so I'm interested in sort of filling in the gaps around history but also personal history too so this is an artwork that I did where I tried to recreate the moment where my mom died and I found her in the bathroom so I took things from the bathroom and the clothes that she wore on the way on the day that she died and then I put myself in the position where I found her because I think that a lot of times we experience events that are really powerful but we don't have nobody else saw it or it's it's hard to visualize and I think one of the great things about being a visual artist is actually putting some kind of an image to those experiences that are hard to talk about or think about so these are some of the comic works these are inspired by actual comics that I read when I was a kid along with Archie and X-Men so these are the actual comics these are the comics that I made basically I took I took some of the images and then I drew I drew into them and I also wrote my own text so it's kind of surreal and more like poetry there's a lot more images of this on my website so you can see more of them there so they range in content from being more traditional to being like very explicit and graphic in this and in my wall drawings text is an important part of my work so I write all of the text and it's almost like writing poetry and doodling and bringing those together so this is made out of pipe cleaners and it's like a hanging text poem so it's pipe cleaners and fishing wire shower curtain and this one is made out of hair braided hair and broken glass so I'm also showing you some work that I've done collaboratively because I love to work with people as well as on my own stuff and these this series of work I'm showing you is like a work that I did with an artist named Mariam Ghani who's also in Brooklyn and it's around all of the detention and deportation and different changes that happen in our landscape after 9-11 so I made this installation where I basically did watercolors pictures of people who were either missing, arrested, deported, detained, questioned and I was inspired by this which is the kind of thing that I saw all over New York City after September 11th when I would be commuting which is missing people flyers of the people who died in the World Trade Center and then at the same time all of these other people were also going missing because the government was feeling very scared about thinking lots of people were terrorists who were not and then not catching the terrorists so these are some of the details of that and then we made a library where we put all of those images together and also collected posters which you see here which we collected from protests and information and had that be part of the artwork. This is written with broken glass and it says no human being is illegal and all of the text in this piece is like different kind of protest slogans. These are parts of the piece. We also made neon signs that we put up on 10th Avenue in Manhattan where there's a lot of taxis so people could see a drive-by art and hopefully think about it. This is another collaborative project I did it's like a family tree a fun fake family tree for queer people gay people. So I worked with like a health organization and all these artists and the Queens Museum so we collected photos like these of people in your family that were gay or people you knew that were gay or yourself and then writers wrote little stories about these people and then put them back into this family tree kind of template that we made where all of the pieces of the tree are actually photographed from the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens and then reassembled and then the poster was on bus stops all over Queens because I don't know if any of you are from Queens or familiar with it but the bus is the big way to move around so not so much with the subway so it was a way to try to use art to get people interested in talking about AIDS and immigration and different issues without making a poster that was very scary and that was like if you do this you're gonna die and then nobody pays attention so and then a lot of my images are also inspired by Bollywood movies Hindi movies and things I read in the news this is a piece called this is an image that of a high school kid who became known as the lyrical terrorist because she was writing these poems about war and death and then she actually got prosecuted by the British government as a potential terrorist and it was a big case in the news so and these are images of movie stars from Indian movies that I saw when I was younger okay I'm gonna move faster this is this is an image that I did that was a collaboration with the fashion photographer who's a friend of mine she was like doing her portfolio and it's all fake by the way it's just makeup and it was makeup that I bought from Party City and then we just put it together and so yeah it was a trying to incorporate my art materials into a portrait so these are more photographic images that I took of a revolutionary figure that I was inspired by that I read about in history so this is me and then I did the mask and then I made this costume with all these eyeballs and tried to imagine this person escaping instead of being hung like he was hung and he died so he was also a freedom fighter have you guys heard of Gandhi yes right so he was he was at the same time as Gandhi and his contemporary but people didn't like him because he also supported violence as a possible means for freedom and then eventually he was hung at the gallows because they tried him for sedition so and he was also very young so this was just me imagining if the guy was would like wake up from the dead or kind of escape or something like that and these were also in Prospect Park