The Juice Box

I had nothing to say last week becuase the universe decided to dump all the snow on earth onto the east coast over the last few days. So, while I was at a loss for words it did give me some time the think about my art practice as my thesis comes around the corner. So enjoy some beating of dead horses and introspection that has never been done before.

When I first got to art school I had one goal in mind and that was to make art that represented me and people who look like me. I set out to define what south asian art looked like and in doing so, I made very strict rules for myself that began to hinder my sense of discovery. As I have grown into my practice and made both good work and absolutely terrible work, I have been able to filter out what I find important and what works for my original goal. What I don’t want my work to boil down to is just paintings made by a south asian about being south asian…there is so much more nuance to myself and what I want to say through art. Maybe this is something that other creative POC’s can relate to. I want my work to discuss things that are more universal like anxiety, inheritance, and dying tradition. While I am trying to engage in these broader ideas, I have always known who I have wanted my audience to be. In the “public eye” I don’t have control over who interacts with my work and what they think but I do know whose voices I am listening for more. Women, women of color, south asians, and questioning muslims (people on their journey with faith) are all people who I look to specifically to hear what my work evokes in them and what they wish they could see more of. This is what solidified the idea for me that art is political. The experiences I am discussing in my paintings are ones that are shared most commonly in south asian diaspora spaces as well as POC communities for example, family pressure, elder reverence, and faith. I want people to sit with my paintings and relate their own experiences back to them. Even though it will never be an exact one-to-one translation of shared experiences, having small shared moments that connect to my viewer is important because, to me, it means their lives were witnessed. Someone watched the same world they exist in and understood the same things they did. Someone looked with a critical eye at the same things that they questioned themselves. I do this with these intentions because it was something I looked for when I was a kid and never really saw it.

I absolutely believe that representation in any facet matters but being the one to do the representing is a cool place to be in as one of a small handful of Pakistani or Muslim painters who are my peers in the arts.