Featured Artist of the Month: October 2020
Creating a World of Unique Visuals
Vaidehi Kinkhabwala’s work is influenced by her bicultural experiences and struggles. She merges colorful Indian decorative attributes and ornamentations with Western notions.
Q: I like to start at the beginning, so can you tell us where you're from, where you grew up and how you first discovered art?
I grew up in India and transitioned to the United States in 2008. In my recollection, I have been acquainted with art in different forms since I was a child. My parents are creative people (my mother is a Kathak dancer and my father is an environmental conservationist who was always interested in art, music, theatre, dance etc), so my sister and I were exposed to various forms of art since childhood. I was given the freedom to draw on walls in my house and in my grandfather’s house and even until very recently those drawings have still stayed on the walls (drawings I did at the age of 5 or 6). I think that is how my exposure to art began — with freedom....
Q: Did you always want to be an artist/pursue art as a career or did you try other things as well?
To look at everything with an unconventional artistic approach and to express myself through visuals, music, dance using these mediums became a way of life while growing up. I was an extremely shy and introverted kid and the option to be able to use these different mediums empowered me and also gave me control over what part of me I wanted the world to analyze.
Even though I was exposed to Indian Classical Dance and music since a very young age, visual art was a parallel language for me in which I could express myself most freely. So when it was time to make a decision to choose a major/career, there wasn’t any debate in my mind. Art was the obvious and only choice for me. This is what I knew best even then.
Q: Can you tell us a little more about your inspiration and the concept behind your work, especially your interest in painting men — and roosters? What commonalities do you see between your 2 primary subjects?
I started working on the Rooster Series in 2016. I had seen these birds at different times in my life and became so intrigued by them that I started reading more and more about the meanings associated with roosters in various cultures and mythology. I found it fascinating that popular culture had glaring symbols of this bird, too.
At the same time, I have been bothered by sexism since I was a child… I started imagining a world where I was the judge of the men I had known — putting them on display for once without giving them an opportunity to explain themselves. Of course not all of my experiences [with men] have been negative, but I wanted to highlight how differently men and women are treated and viewed.
So this work stems from anger and frustration, which eventually turned into empathy and also indifference. I put the soul of the men I have known into these roosters, and later, I put rooster heads on human bodies so as to put men on display without them knowing it.
Q: I know you are also interested in how ethnicity is represented in popular culture - and in juxtaposing different cultures - can you talk more about that and why it interests you?
When I came to America as a Graduate Student, I realized how this world was so vastly different. In India, there is a sensory overload of culture, food, visuals, colors, patterns and so many others things. Here in America I kept feeling a vast emptiness in terms of visuality.
As time passed I started finding similarities in differences and patterns in so many visuals around me which were part of pop culture. The language of expression was absolutely different but I started weaving stories to inculcate them in my mind to comfort myself from feeling lonely and homesick. I started to juxtapose the culture where I had come from and the one I was trying to fit in and put them side by side and weave my own reality in the process. And that journey led me to creating a world of unique visual experiences where I found comfort in loneliness and closeness in distance.
Q: Do you have any current or upcoming projects you can tell us about?
I am currently part of the ongoing exhibit “ She Is 2020” in Tribeca at One Art Space Gallery. I find it one of the most meaningful exhibitions of my career. It is a group Exhibition that views the world through a woman’s eyes. It empowers women to be tenacious, outspoken and fierce. "She is" not defined by society - She is crazy, She is angry, She is perceptive, She is relevant, She is selfish, She is emotional, She is sensitive and so on. She is who she wants to be!
I also am going to be part of Superfine DC in October 2020. I will be showing works I made during the lockdown and in response to the ongoing Black Lives Matter protests in NYC. It is work I made while I have been in turmoil in so many ways, and it is also turning towards emphasizing the setting more than the protagonist, as we start to rethink how we need to be more mindful in our ways.
View More of her work here!
