Sharmistha Ray

“In these conceptual works on paper, I adapt modes of automatic writing and schematic models to build intuitive geometries. In a process I call “performative South Asian queer-feminist emotional- intellectual labor,” writing-out-of-my-psyche is an iterative act of self-recovery from spaces of erasure. My ‘spirit maps’ are influenced by queer visualities, Hindu and Buddhist yantras and mandalas, South Asian tapestries, meta experiences of landscapes, and the concept of a musical raga (“color,” “dye,” “hue”) in Indian Classical Music, which is a melodic framework for improvisation with symbolic associations to season, time, and mood/emotion. The titles, like the works themselves, perform in order to assert references that can easily be erased in a reading of the work, especially in instances of cultural mistranslation (and, in extreme cases, censorship). They offer clues, but are not intended to be descriptive.”
-Sharmistha Ray