My artistic practice is in the realm of the unfinished, partial, and experimental. This experimentalism shows up in my evolving selection of materials and processes of mark-making, cut-outs, and collage. I am testing, creating, and critiquing the possibilities and limits of visual and written language. By using family and travel photographs, juxtaposed and transliterated English and Urdu text, and religious and intimate objects in collages, installations, photographs, and video work, I forge a vocabulary drawing from visual canons that are too often absent. In working with imagery that is often marked foreign, my work challenges the position of the universal. The work grapples with the dialectics of language, between having and lacking the power to define how we speak, how we are seen and heard. .
Alongside my core materials are labor-intensive processes with which I am experimenting: stencils and cut outs; copying, dismantling, re-assembling, layering, and collage. I copy images from my archive; cut lines in and through faces and silhouettes; layer, re-copy, re-size, and flatten images into disorienting collages. The stencils, cut outs, and collage techniques invert the relationship between positive and negative space, scrambling what it means to be absent or present.
