Aranka Israni
SEEME IS PROUD TO PRESENT
THE STORY OF ARTIST:
Aranka Israni
”This series interprets the Feminine, the Masculine, and the principle of Union, and aims to mirror that which lies within our own reflection. When viewed as moving into one another, as a uniting of the spirit and the physical selves in flight from separation, these halves create a marriage of self and shadow, a spiritual evolution of the physical creature. Seen instead as a splitting out of union, the physical and the spiritual abandoning one another to the graces of selfish autonomy, these images seem to disclose a fundamental and sacred visual of a personal mitosis as the physical person and ethereal person step apart to view one another - or turn away from one another completely. When these same images are viewed as fixed, the physical self in balance with the reflected non-physical self, the creation of a third presence is revealed, a new whole evoking creatures of a mythological or dream origin - much like the cyclical Ouroboros, swallowing its own tail and invariably recreating itself.”
“Blood Drawings, by artist Aranka Israni, is the mapping of an aesthetic and alchemical experience over the course of several years. The series makes oblique reference to the artist’s cultural and familial background; the material used in the creation of the works is not blood, as the title would suggest, but sindoor, a red powder used as a marker of blessings in Hindu ceremonial traditions.” - by Avni Doshi
”These natural powders and pigments are layered on wood or canvas and finally bathed in the most unnatural of substances, epoxy resin. As temperature and gravity war with the materials and express themselves through contraction and pull, the color is literally stimulated to motion until halted by the eventual hardening of the resin. The visual effect is an explosion of vibrant movement, appearing to expand from its own depths, mirroring both the imagery of our physical cosmos, as well as that most intimate, singular, internal human journey as experienced through meditation and alignment with source energy. The apparent contradictions are not hypocrisy, but rather, the echo of the poetic dualities of humankind, inward and outward, life and death, of the physical vs. the non-physical, of nature vs. manmade, of chaos vs. order; of the search for the dark in the light and the light in the dark.”
