| Indian American Grandmothers Project |
|
“Relentless Change, Relenting Lives” is a blend of painting and video installation. It documents the progression of five paintings from inception to completion through a series of photographs that culminate in a slide show. This technique of making the creative process transparent, coupled with narratives by my five subjects — local Indian-American grandmothers — marries the paintings’ progression with the progression of their lives. The process and resulting narrative portraits infuse painting with concepts of time, change and memory. The resulting work captures the ambiguous psychological space that my subjects occupy as accidental immigrants straddling two cultures. I culled the two-minute videos from over four hours of interviews with each of my subjects while they shared their life story and memories that are important to them.
This work is both a document and a memorial to the silent lives of the elderly in immigrant communities. As a document, it functions as oral history, an archive of Indian American history. As a memorial, it is a tribute to five amazing women who have survived tremendous changes as their life unraveled before them. This work also has cross-cultural appeal in the universality of aging, the role of women as all giving, and the rootlessness and yearning engendered by the immigrant condition.
|
|
|
|
|
Images 1
to 4
of 6
|
Next
|
|
