Chitra Ganesh received a BA magna cum laude from Brown University and
an MFA from Columbia University. Her work has been exhibited at the Queens
Museum of Art, Brooklyn Museum, Bronx Museum, Momenta Art, Bose Pacia
Modern, Apex Art, White Columns, Brooklyn Academy of Music's Next Wave
Festival, and the Jersey City Museum, all in New York, as well as in
Canada, Brazil, Italy and India. Her work has been reviewed in Time Out/New
York, Art Asia Pacific Magazine, India Today, and the New York Times.
She was nominated for the Rema Hort Mann Foundation Grant. Awards and
residencies include the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, the
Henry Street Settlement Abrons Art Center Artists-in-Residence program,
the College Art Association's Professional Development Fellowship, and
the Astraea Visual Arts Fund. Ganesh has been a Board Member of the South
Asian Women's Creative Collective (SAWCC).
Ganesh is currently working on Amnesia's Travels, a comic book that
creates an alternate mythology to explore how memories and their repression
shape personal and social crises. The project is inspired by Hindu mythology,
present day imperialism and queer politics, and erased moments in South
Asian history. Taking such stories, the comic's hybrid world articulates
both historical and psychic conflict.
INTERVIEW
Interview date: April 2005
Interviewed by Ka-Man Tse
LMCC: So tell me about your process. How do you
work?
Chitra: Writing is a very important part of my process.
I do a lot of writing, and also reading and research, and in doing
that stuff I come upon ideas that interest me. So I don’t
necessarily have in mind what I want to do, but it’s through
considering a number of different things that interest me that I finally
come to something. Whether it is a drawing or an object. It depends. I
approach similar content through lots of different media.
LMCC: You were talking about interdisciplinary
influences…What influences your work?
Chitra: Well in terms of artwork, contemporary art
work, there’s a bunch of stuff that I am influenced by. Some
of what I really like is the way in which certain artists use text
in their work and have a disjuncture between the text and the image
so that it’s not a one-on-one relation… I enjoy that.
LMCC: Can you give me an example?
Chitra: Like Raymond Pettibon. I
noticed that in a different way when I went to go see the Basquiat
show. I’ve been thinking about bringing text into my own work
and how it’s merged as an important aspect. Just seeing
how there’s this friction between the images and the text where
the meaning is created, that’s what I’m interested in. In
terms of other influences, more traditional graphic novel and zine
culture, such as different types of graphic novels like Palestine or Persepolis. And
then different artist books and zines.
LMCC: How do you describe your style?
Chitra: I think the figure is important in my work. So figurative. Whether
that means there’s an actual figure in the work or whether
that means that I’m working with the absence of the
figure, or disembodied elements or parts of the body, I think that
the body becomes a site where all of the things that I’m interested
in looking at, how external conflict become internalized, and how history
blends with mythology, all those things end up being manifested in
the body. So that, and graphic, I would say. In a more
traditional sense of graphic, like high contrast black and white, but
also graphic like violent or sexual.
LMCC: I want you to talk about the element of
feminism and queer politics in your work.
Chitra: I’m interested in mythology both because
they’re stories that tell us who we are and why we are and how
we came to be, but also because, implicit in those stories are certain
prescriptive role models of gender or gender expression. There’s
a lot of eroticism and violence and perversion in mythology but it’s
only put there to be stamped out and made to disappear, to be resolved,
to create a harmonious vision of society, or really homogenous. I
think it’s important to look at that, and to look at those mythologies
so that one can excavate and recover or imagine alternate modes of
female sexuality or power, or gender expression or just gender. For
me it’s also about how in traditional feminism, and in traditional
civil rights or anti-oppression work there’s this whole idea
of creating a positive image, or a good image and substituting the
good image for the bad image that other people have created. But it’s
the very idea that there is a good image and there is a
bad image, that’s something that I want to challenge.
LMCC: Can you talk more about the element of storytelling
in your work and the creation of worlds?
Chitra: I think that there’s something about
the narrative structure in traditional stories that people are very
familiar with and I’m interested in a lot of my work, the idea
of the uncanny and bringing something that’s very familiar
and decontextualizing it, and having that sort of dissonance create
another experience with the viewer, whether that’s with materials
or not. But I also feel that it’s with story telling, having
elements in the work that are about more traditional narrative, like
certain kinds of conflicts or certain kinds of resolutions. Drawing
the viewer into the work like that but then unraveling that kind of
narrative structure in the work, so that you don’t exactly know
what’s going on or how it got there but it looks like it should
be part of some story or part of another story.
LMCC:What are you thinking about doing next?
Chitra: Resting. [laughs] Well, I’m excited
about this opportunity [LMCC Open Studios]. And I’m really excited
to actually do something here and hardcore finish in the next three
weeks and bring together all the stuff that I’ve been working
on that right now just feels like little poops and little craps all
over the place. But I would like to slow down my process a little
bit so that I didn’t feel that I’m always producing stuff
just for deadline, that I have these constant homework assignments. They’re
shows, which is great, but every month or two there’s something. I
would like to have several months to just develop an idea so that I
could really be behind it instead of feeling “Oh, I haven’t
had enough time to step back from this and think about it.”
LMCC: Is that a problem when you’re an artist
that has these sort of “patrons,” -- I don’t mean
patron in the full sense of the word, but you have these relationships
with this institutions. They’re like ok, we want you to
do this show. Do you feel like you work better….
Chitra: I think so, a little bit. I think it’s
also an issue for a lot of artists who create site-specific work. You
have to create the work for the site. And because of the logistical
constraints you just don’t have five weeks to install. You
only have five days. I was just talking about this with somebody
yesterday, but as much as you prepare beforehand, you get there and
something totally changes. I’m going to be really prepared this
time and you realize that, “Oh, there’s actually this kind
of wood behind the wall and you can’t actually put this kind
of nail in it.” “Oh we decided to move you over there
because someone else needs this wall.” I think there’s
a part of that process that’s very natural to doing installation
or site-specific work, and then the other part of that is just this
pressure to feel that you have to produce in order to be out there
and have your work be visible and to show. I think it’s
kind of a mixture of two things. And also just studio space,
I mean this [the LMCC Residency] this is amazing, but it’s so
rare that you get so much walls and windows, or both walls and windows. [both
laugh] You know, all that kind of stuff. …
LMCC:What CD or song are you listening to the
most or way to much?
Chitra: Right now I’ve been listening to a mix
that a friend of mine made me and it has a lot Silica on it. There’s
this guy called Lord Kitchener, he’s a soca music guy from the
60s. I’ve been listening to the Dr. Who theme a lot, which
has been on my mind. Sonic Youth. Nina Simone; I’m frequently
listening to this song called Backlash Blues, it’s so good, and
it was sung so long ago, and it’s just so relevant, it’s
amazing.
LMCC:What album is that on?
Chitra: I don’t know. I’m a down loading
junkie.
LMCC:Favorite website?
Chitra: Astro.com, the New York Times, nifty.org,
and google.
