Chitra Ganesh, Resident Artist Lecture 2019

Chitra Ganesh gives a lecture talking about her interdisciplinary artistic practice spanning drawing, painting, writing, comic books, performance, installation, sculpture, sound, and textiles. Ganesh, a Skowhegan alumni from 2001, also shares experiences of her time as a participant, reflecting on how Skowhegan was the place that taught her how to step outside of her comfort zone and cultivate new skills as an artist. Ganesh recounts her earliest memories of encountering visual art to the participants; when she was a young child growing up in New York City and was presented with constant visual encounters and interventions in public spaces. Ganesh remembers noticing how ephemeral works occupied space through being hand drawn and inscribed onto advertisements, as well as her exposure to a lexicon of icons and objects drawn from Hindu/Buddhist iconographies and Bollywood posters. This led to Ganesh’s practice slowly evolving to her interest in the cyclical nature of time and the space of the gutter: where science fiction and myth meet as a way to bring submerged stories to the future. Ganesh ends her lecture by focusing on two recent projects: one at the Rubin Museum and one at The Kitchen, and reflects on how she continues to search for and find gaps and fissures in her visual experiences as an artist, dissecting and reassembling disparate images that stay with her.