As an artist whose primary medium is photography, I create work that rests between two worlds, Bombay, India where I was born and raised, and America where I now reside. These two worlds could not be further apart from each other, and has become the material of my work.
Bombay is all about color, saturated and brilliant and of every hue that incorporates an array of detailed textures and sensibilities. Space is packed tight, congested, but fully utilized and life expands upward with antiquity resting on top of modernity. Every aspect of life unconsciously incorporates art; vehicles of transport are as decorated as a shrine would be. America is about outward expansion, slow creeping urban sprawl that spreads and infiltrates the wild beauty of nature. Color is less saturated in America and light is reflected differently, even the nature of the crowded cities differs greatly from Bombay which for all its Westernization and British colonial architecture, is characteristically Eastern. On occasion these worlds collide or merge, and here lies the content of my work.
My photomontages speak about history, humanity, and our place in it. They are amalgamations of reconstructed landscapes that illustrate both cultural decline and development of Eastern and Western cultures. I merge abstraction with realism and built with naturally formed environments that comment upon consumerism and replenishment. I ask the viewer to ponder our global existence. Unreachable distances shrink as we span the world through instant communication, travel, and media.
Each photomontage utilizes forty to a few hundred separate photographic images to create something intriguing at every glance. I have found that there are over a thousand different blues of the sky, and that light throws a different spectrum of color on various parts of the globe. What I am building is a new landscape out of fractions of everyday life that are harmonious but at the same time full of contradiction.
