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Articles
On Automythography
The New York-based artist Mequitta Ahuja examines how cultural history and myth go hand in hand in her works and how the female protagonist becomes the subject and maker of her own world.
My mentor has told me, “Your work will bring you everything.” By which he means, one can be efficient in their efforts, focus only on making art and the rest: community, love, material needs, will all come as an outcome of that singular effort. So far this is proving true.
I just moved to New York and am a full time artist. I moved to the Manhattan neighborhood, Harlem and have a studio on the historic 125th St. It overlooks the sidewalk commerce, not unlike that of Delhi or Mumbai; men sing their advertising slogans and call out to passersby to attract their attention. It is cold here and we recently got our first snow. The make-shift stalls are wrapped in plastic, a strategy to protect the vendour against the blowing wind and snow. I have my window cracked to mitigate the paint fumes. The sounds of the street waft in along with the crisp fresh air.
I have been working here for twelve weeks and already have nine new works. This is a speedy pace for me, in rhythm, perhaps, with the pace of 125th. Rhythm, in fact, is a current concern for me. Not sonic percussion but visual rhythm, the way you move up and across a painted surface, the pace of the resting spots along the way, the staccato of your eye as it hits each pause and resumes its movement. In these recent works, I establish the rhythm with thick, linear marks.
My walk from the subway to the studio takes me past the Apollo Theater, a hallmark of African American creative production. On the sidewalk out front of the Apollo is an awkwardly drawn memorial to the late Michael Jackson. Harlem is still predominantly Black but, it is the most diverse place I have ever lived. There are African Americans, Dominicans, people from the Caribbean, Northern Africans, native French speakers, Muslims, Jews, the wealthy, the poor, Black people with P.H.D.s, artists, teachers and political activists. I love it here.
I’ve lived in various parts of the country but, I grew up only an hour away in Connecticut. So close, but a different world by far. As a child, the majority of my social interactions were with the upper middle class white kids of my school and the Indian families with which my family associated. I attended Bat Mitzvahs and Diwali parties and exchanged Rakhi gifts with my boy cousins through the mail. My African American mother cooked Channa Masala, Aloo Parathas and Mutton. My Indian Father called me “Beta” and yelled “Chalo” from the front hall whenever we were headed out as a family.
There are parts of the world, Mauritius, Trinidad, where being of both Black and Indian parentage is a frequent occurrence. The United States is not one of them and, in my lifetime, I have met only three people, besides my own sister, whom have this particular ethnic make-up.
In order to make the complexity of this subject position visible, I focus on self-portraiture and landscape. The landscapes, which border on total abstraction are the domain of the figure. I refer to my ongoing project as Automythography. A variation on the term coined by artistic parent, author Audre Lorde, ‘Automythography’ blends cultural history and myth with personal narrative. I begin with solo performances in front of the camera, positioning myself as agent of my own depiction. I document these performances using a remote shutter control and use the resulting photographs as non-fictional source material. Through my preparatory drawing process, I establish the invented elements of my works. The resulting self-portraits embody a form of creative self-sufficiency. My visual thinking traverses: expressionism, Indian miniature painting, children’s art, naturalism, primitivism, landscape, cave painting, sculptural relief, classicism and color field painting. As an African American and South Asian American woman, the multiplicity of my artistic sources is reflective of my complex heritage and a counter to monolithic ‘racial’ categories. I develop the surface of my paintings in many layers, scraping and re- painting. The physicality of the paint is mirrored by my female protagonist’s assertive presence in the painting. She is both subject and maker of her world.
(Mequitta Ahuja is a New York-based artist of Indian – African origins. She holds a BA from Hampshire College, Amherst, MA, USA and MFA from University of Illinois, Chicago, USA. She has had solo shows at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Lawndale Art Centre in Houston and BravinLee Programs in New York.)
