Waking from Dreams of India
This work tells the story of my lifelong dream of exploring India, the land of my father’s birth. He died without telling me much about the culture in which he grew up or the story of his early life there. Growing up in the United States, isolated from Indian culture fostered the cultivation of imaginative fantasy about the land of my ancestry. My knowledge of India ripened from exoticized Western media accounts. None of this prepared me for the discovery of the circumstances that drove my father away from his family as a teenager, or the actual masala mix of complexity, misery and beauty of contemporary India that I finally had the opportunity to see for myself. Having now made several trips, and collected a wealth of photographic images, videotape, and journal writings, I am shaping this material into a body of work that connects and contrasts my youthful fantasies of India with my adult experience building a relationship with the land of my ancestry. I hope to symbolize the merging of the actual lived journey with the expectations I carried for half a lifetime.
I merge images from different times and places to juxtapose ancient and modern, mythical and real, imagined and lived. I collage appropriated popular Indian “calendar art” imagery of Hindu deities into my photographs. In bringing this storied imagery into the contemporary world, I am referencing contemporary clashes of values and cultures that are occurring on the subcontinent. By removing these printed gods from spiritual contemplation in sylvan glades and temples, and bringing them into the chaotic capitalist hurly burly that is contemporary India, I want to show how the Hindu pantheon, representing an imperturbable and entirely non-western view of reality really do walk the streets of postmodern India. Their presence is palpable in the integration of spirituality into the country’s daily life. India also worships newer Deities with as much fervor as the old. The loosening of government control on foreign investment in the early 90’s led to a continuing economic boom in India and the meteoric rise of a huge new middle class. Western materialism and the mass appeal of flavor-of-the-month Bollywood icons have added another vibrant layer to India’s visual culture. The iconography of consumerism and media celebrity often borrows from that of the ancient gods. These recent manifestations of India’s striving for an earthly paradise have also found a place in my art.
As a child of mixed British and Indian heritage, I witnessed and took part in post-colonial battles playing themselves out on a domestic scale. For me, the complex history of these images signifies the emergence of my own identity, a slow process of assimilating influences from both cultures. My use of these images brings them back to their original function as a kind of subversive bridge between cultures, with the understanding that part of their richness arises from the multiple meanings that are doomed to different interpretations by individuals on either side of the east-west divide. Finding some way to reconcile these differing perspectives inspires this creative project.