Sahana Ramakrishnan

Austintipede

2019

Austintipede, 2019

Sahana Ramakrishnan’s work blends cultural influences, spanning a range of visual mythologies, she weaves together a tapestry of pop cultural references that are upended by the artist’s exploration of identity, sexuality and gender perspectives. Narrative journeys are central to myth, and Ramakrishnan’s own journey through culture, mythology and sexuality is echoed in the physical matter she uses to create her work. The artist embarks on Odyssean quests for her materials. These range from broken glass, to coffee shop burlap sacks, traditional gold leaf, grungy mop strings, and even her own blood, drawn by a doctor-turned-Uber driver that Ramakrishnan befriended during an everyday commute.

Austintipede is exemplary of this collected accumulative technique, composed of Ferric chloride, acrylic, sumi ink, asphaltum, rope, rhinestones, glass beads, gold leaf, and color pencil on paper.

At the heart of her practice are social relationships like this that the artist develops with both people and objects. Even the very basic, physical substances of her paintings and sculptures hold secret narratives within them. This makes her work intensely personal; yet her use of myth provides a visual backbone for viewers to enter into the work and allows for a momentary transcendence over the intensely textured, material paintings into a realm of signification and narrative play.

Sahana Ramakrishnan creates images that are complicated, dissonant, and abject in ways that open the heart and mind. She addresses issues related to the violent and shifting processes by which we form our cultural, gender, sexual, and human identities, taking inspiration from myths that prioritize spiritual and emotional experience over historical fact or rational thought. Her work is a web of cultural interfacing. Mixtures of Hindu, Buddhist, and Greek visual mythologies weave together into a tapestry of pop cultural references that are upended by the artist’s exploration of identity, sexuality and gender perspectives. Real and imaginary, traditional and ground breaking, Sahana Ramakrishnan’s work maintains a multilayered complexity in both subject and material. Most importantly, her work provides viewers the opportunity to reimagine familiar symbols and narratives drawn from typically masculine mythology and culture from the metamorphic perspective of a woman.

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Sahana Ramakrishnan Austintipede

Sahana Ramakrishnan

Austintipede