21. Meena Hasan & Sharmistha Ray
Sharmistha Ray and Meena Hasan meet one-on-one for the first time on a July summer morning for a Zoom studio visit and exchange about painting, abstraction and how their shared Bengali heritage across borders informs their work, particularly as it relates to language and textiles.
Meena Hasan, Installation View, New England Triennial, deCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, Lincoln MA, April-September 2022
Sharmistha Ray (SR): I’ve seen some images of your work and read a little bit about it; but I would love to use this opportunity to have a mini studio visit with you. First of all, I’d love to know why you thought of me in terms of a connection…
Meena Hasan (MH): I think my work is shaped by an innate desire to share a specific immersive experience that abstraction can offer, and I have been trying to do this through methods of figuration and depiction; I love playing within that tension between the unnameable and the nameable, puzzling through recognition and legibility. I want to see if I can offer an experience beyond language through language. For example, I’ve been making first-person perspective point-of-view paintings since 2013, in order to complicate the role of the subject, the artist and the viewer, to compress those positions and meddle in the painting’s social function and power dynamics. I think of abstraction as a space where the viewer is inside the subject, rather than one that asks the viewer to read an experience outside of themselves, through the surrogacy of an illustrated subject. Abstraction asks you to step right into the subject, to see and feel through the artist, placing you inside the mind of the painting, the painting becomes the figure. When I was considering an artist to interview, I wanted to talk to someone, and hopefully more specifically a Bengali artist working in America, for whom abstraction is central as a language and mode of expression, so I was so absolutely thrilled when you accepted my invitation.
Let me pull up some images of my recent works and process shots to help – these are of two pieces I currently have up in the New England Triennial at the deCordova Museum in Lincoln MA. These large paper pieces start as meditative drawings, without an idea of how they will end up. With this (Guan Chauper, Join or Die, 2021), I wanted to make work that directly addresses New England, given that I’ve been teaching there for the last 3 years and it’s been a really intense cultural exchange for me. I was looking at snakes and ladders board games and Ben Franklin’s political cartoon calling for the unity of the 13 American colonies against the British, it is of this broken snake form. This piece is one of the most political works I have made in some time. These works started with me just drawing snakes, volumistic lines that curl and coil. I drew a ton of snakes over Covid, the snake is a form that has been dwelling comfortably and consistently in my subconscious for quite some time now...
Meena Hasan, Join or Die, Gyuan Chauper, acrylic and Flashe on paper. 93 x 49 inches, 2022
SR: Is this the verso of the piece?
MH: Yes, this is the verso
SR: That’s beautiful. It kind of reminds me of a deconstructed flag, you know?
MH: Yes exactly, these two pieces follow the exact dimensions of the flag, 3:5. This one is made in 13 strips that are cut out and held together with clear acrylic medium used like skin collagen. I’m about to move back into my old studio in Greenpoint and will have the time to play with these large-scale paper works again, and especially to play with their installation which is hard to do in my current home studio. The thing I love about these, is how they hang in the room…
SR: I love the spatial relationships they create…
MH: Yes! I want to offer a phenomenological kind of experience when walking around these paintings. When seen from the side, they disappear, you can’t see them, they become as thin and invisible as a sheet of paper and then, they expand and reveal themselves as you continue to move around them, they become immersive spaces and narrative compositions in motion. They are really very social, they flirt with you, they’ll perform and show off but they are also shy and autonomous. The backs, I like to think of the backs like the guts of them, their insides, how they are made, what makes their blood pump and nerves react, some of their internal secrets revealed.
SR: It’s interesting to see how this elemental form of figuration morphs into an abstract form. I think it’s pretty fascinating when that happens. The figuration forms a ghost layer in a way. It’s present, but also hidden which creates a sense of mystery; kind of like a secret that’s held within the layers of the work. Tell me about the one on the left, those look like painted strips…
MH: Yes, they are on Japanese Kozo papers, and are like fabric in a lot of ways, very strong and durable. There’s a lot of displacement, dislocation and relocation of form in these, that’s healed and sutured in a way with acrylic medium – they’re very skin-like. They start with bamboo pen ink drawing, like a stick and poke tattoo, scratched into the layers of paper, the way ink can sit under layers of skin for a lifetime. After that initial drawing, they go through many phases of acrylic application and dying. I studied Batik when I studied abroad, so I use acrylic somewhat like how wax is used in Batik…
SR: I am really responding to the rawness they communicate through their surfaces. I am into that kind of viscerality when approaching painting. I also love that style of (Indian) painting…
MH: It’s maybe even more akin to Kalamkari dying and painting – although not nearly as exquisitely laborious.
SR: Yeah, I see that.
MH: I welcome chaos in my process, the surfaces hold a lot of time and evolution within them, they are meditative spaces. I try to use material in a way that honors the material’s qualities themselves, its viscosity, sheen, resistance etc, rather than controlling material purely as a means towards an end. The work is self aware in this way, of its own making, it declares its construction. I set up a system, a criteria of catalyzing activity that usually has to do with a photographic reference and I spend time looking and waiting before making a move. For every successful painting there are at least 3 that don’t work, that end up becoming collaged parts of other works years down the line. They are like bodies in the way their surfaces hold history and lived affect like skin, and they are also like a pattern or design that gets produced, sold and worn across economies and continents and decades. To me, textiles, pattern and decoration are part of my cellular structure, part of being a person, and especially a South Asian American person in the world as an aesthetic being, that my subjectivity constitutes complex dynamics between personhood and objecthood. Anne Cheng in her book Ornamentalism talks about a fusion between a synthetic objecthood and organic personhood that resonates with me. For these reasons, I love to use paint in ways that parallel textile methods and traditions like Kalamkari, Jamdani weaving, Kantha stitching and, probably most consistently, Batik.
Meena Hasan, The Empress (from Drouais’ Madame de Pompadour at her Tambour Frame, 1764), acrylic and Flashe on paper. 76 x 47 1/2 inches, 2021
SR: What is your own relationship to that particular style of batik painting?
MH: I studied Batik in college when I studied abroad in Florence, I made many silk paintings and fell in love with the process as a way of thinking through constructing an image - the way images are imbedded into a surface and become structural, the physicality and objecthood of Batik as both image and object really resonated with me, I love the way wax sits, cracks and holds pigment and try to make my acrylic do the same. Batik also helped me access textiles as central to my practice, as my first visual language, my visual DNA and first artistic genealogy as grounded in pattern and decoration. My mom’s always been interested in textiles…
SR: My mother was a fashion designer. She has the best collection of sarees. I grew up around textiles too. There’s this one Jamini Roy saree she has which I love and am secretly coveting. I’m more likely to frame it than wear it though!
MH: Amazing. Do you feel that influenced your work at all?
SR: Oh well yeah, it definitely did! But I don’t want to interrupt you…
MH: Well, please, this is a conversation! I am supposed to be interviewing you…
SR: (laughter) Well, I see it as a conversation. I mean that’s always more interesting right? A mutual inquiry shall we say?
MH: (laughter) Yes okay…
SR: My mother’s work absolutely did influence me. I was born in Calcutta* and we went back every other summer from Kuwait, where I grew up. Patterned textiles are a way of life in Indian homes. Most of my family is pretty ‘middle-class’ and the aesthetics in most of these homes are pretty chaotic. Color and patterns are everywhere: things just clash and blend. The idea of selecting and curating a space doesn’t exist. That kind of maximalism resides within me. I don’t really understand negative space. I mean, theoretically I do, but in practice, I want to fill it all up. When I lived in India a few years ago, I visited some of the leading textile collections, like the Calico Museum in Ahmedabad which was founded by the Sarabhais. There’s also the Tapi Collection in Surat, which I didn’t have an opportunity to visit but I saw museum exhibitions in Mumbai, where I lived. I also engaged with some pretty amazing textile arts in Jaisalmer in Rajasthan, where incidentally, most abstract Tantra work comes from. I love the collective nature of the way these women work. They’re cooking, cleaning, nursing their young, they do everything. And then they make these large tapestries. And one woman will come, or two and three, it’s their social time, they’re just talking and working. They create these collaborative pieces that are just incredible. It’s a melding of the unconscious. It makes you wonder why we need so many cognitive structures (laughter)! I’ve seen this way of working in South East Asia as well. Communities work together. It was probably the same in some African American quilting traditions, but I am not completely sure…
MH: Like Alabama’s Gee’s Bend quilting tradition maybe, yes…
Hilma’s Ghost (Sharmistha Ray + Dannielle Tegeder), Automatic Theorem Painting #1, 60 x 48 inches. Oil stained on cotton velveteen mounted on wood panel, 2022
SR: It’s really the patterning, the repetition, the color schemas, the symmetry, those things that have come into my work from textiles. It’s interesting, with [my collective] Hilma’s Ghost, you see the influence of the Bauhaus and Constructivism in our collaborative work that comes through my collaborator, Dannielle [Tegeder] and there’s this interesting friction with my esthetics, which are mostly South Asian. You see it physically in the work through the differences in composition, color, structures. I’m also interested in these cultural fusions in abstraction. It’s also historical. Do you know that Kala Bhavan, the famous art school in Santiniketan, West Bengal, was founded by Rabindranath Tagore in the same year as the Bauhaus, in 1919? I always find that parallel fascinating…
MH: Wow wild!
SR: Yes! It’s just wild – for so long the ‘west’ wrote this story about Modern art in which the ‘east’ made derivative work. The truth is it was more of an exchange.
MH: In terms of your distinctly South Asian aesthetics, when I think of your works, I think that there is something very powerful built into the way you approach process that feels urgent, intuitive and meditative, that maybe comes out of your study of tantric art practices. Do you feel like you’ve been practicing this kind of process-based making? That one might even call divinatory? I’m also curious about the kinds of parallel practices you might be engaging in, if there are processes you engage with that go beyond creating an art object in and of itself, but become methods for self exploration, expression, attention and maybe care? I just started taking Bengali lessons, I’ve been looking for a Bangla tutor for years, and I finally found an incredible teacher who Skypes with me twice a week from Dhaka, and these lessons feel crucial, as a parallel practice that I am absolutely committed to. I’m feeling so fed and nourished by studying Bangla, I am absolutely in love with the language and giddy like I’m crushing all the time now. And I’m taking some ownership over the shame I have about how much I’ve forgotten, it’s really powerful to take a few hours each week to play with Bangla and build it into my psyche again, into the rhythm of my inner monologue, it feels so fundamental to who I am.
SR: Bengali script is so visual. It’s so beautiful.
MH: So beautiful. I learned Bengali as a kid, and not entirely from my parents. Because of my school in New York and the fact that I had issues with my speech as a child, my parents kind of stopped speaking Bangla with me at home. So the Bangla that I did speak was learned from different kinds of people outside of my immediate family, class and region. My grammar, pronunciation and word choice in terms of dialects are all over the place and it's been really fun to have someone who will sit with me and go through all the different ways I say a thing, and why I might have learned to say something in a specific way and what the different contexts for different kinds of cadence might be. Before, it was just a jumbled mess in my head and I would just hope for the best. And now I know I’ve been very rude and inappropriate in my grammar or tone, very often, and those were moments that I picked up on socially without really understanding why someone was reacting, even just with their bodies, in the way they might have been reacting. And in terms of making visual art and thinking about what an art practice can offer, this idea of translation is so central, I think, to sharing experiences and meeting people and audiences beyond my own experience and thinking about all the different levels of dialogue that one can engage with in a painting, that is a major aspect of painting that makes the medium so important to me; it can be such a generous mode of communication. I’ve always studied a language other than English, and that's been a very important parallel practice.
SR: Yeah, Bengali, it’s interesting because it’s the first language that I learned. I once had a German language teacher who said “if you don't use it, you lose it.” I grew up in Kuwait, but my parents did actually make an effort to speak Bengali around us and we would go to India every other summer where I only spoke in Bengali with my relatives –so I was pretty fluent and comfortable with it. But coming to America and being so far away from the spoken language, I started forgetting. But the moment I was back in Calcutta, it all came back to me so quickly and before I knew it I was speaking fairly fluently. It’s like all these words and expressions just live dormant in your brain waiting to be activated!
MH: I’m so jealous of that fluency! I hope I get there someday! But apologies, because I seem to have hijacked my own question about your parallel practices by talking about my Bengali lessons. I’m curious about your relationship to ritual, to an idea of “practice”, to repetition in action in other words. For me it has a lot to do with the spaces I am in. I’m very much a studio junkie, forgive the phrase, I go through withdrawal if I take a week off or something. I like being in my studio. It has become more and more true, probably a product of Covid. I’m really jealous of people who can fold up their surfaces and work anywhere and everywhere. I hope to manage to figure out how to do that someday for myself. But right now I’ve become very into nesting: maintaining my spaces, cooking, meditation, physical practices like running and yoga.
SR: I used to be someone who depended on having a daily studio practice, but I have a more flexible relationship with that now. I have a home studio for my own work and, until recently, had a joint studio with Hilma’s Ghost. Both the collective and I are looking for independent studio spaces! Not easy in New York…
MH: Of course, it's such a privilege to have a studio space here…
SR: I go through intense bouts of really working a lot, but then I can go through intense bouts of doing other things, like being more involved in my art criticism and seeing shows, or reading more and pursuing other curiosities. I really got into hot yoga once and that became a parallel practice. Now it’s mostly writing and teaching. I’m really not a purist, but I do think being nonlinear nourishes my studio life.
MH: Speaking and writing seem to have always been such a big part of your practice, have those modes of expression always been comfortable for you?
SR: I had terrible stage fright when I was a kid. I dealt with that by doing theater. Theater, writing, speaking, art…essentially they are all modes of communicating. It’s been nice to have a wider toolbox, but the speaking really came about because of queer activism, which overlaps for me with BIPOC activism. Creating spaces for oneself and others to thrive in.
MH: Beautiful. I love your commitment to communication as a way to make space. This resonates for me in thinking about your studio practice, where mark making and physicality are so generously offered. Some of your works even use language and writing as marks I think right? Tell me more about that process…
Sharmistha Ray, Blindspot #16, 11.75 x 8.25 inches. Automatic writing with colored pens on archival sketchbook paper, 2018-ongoing
SR: I started the Blind Spot series when I came back from India. It was like starting all over again. So I gave myself a blank slate and made the simplest shape that felt whole to me - a circle - and I started writing in the circle. It became a stream of consciousness, but I also wanted to bring my image-making and writing practices together and hold them in the same space. I also started to fantasize about making work that I could just roll up and travel with. I had just shipped a 40 foot container back to New York with all the stuff that I had accumulated in India. Much of it was large paintings and heavy parts of installations. I imagine just being able to carry my work with me wherever I go.
MH: That’s the dream!
SR: The Blind Spot works were about coming back to this culture and feeling invisibilized again. I like that the cursive gets all tangled up and becomes a hybrid script. It could be English or Bangla or Arabic. I didn't want people to be able to read what I was writing. I wanted them to be like protective shields for my messy outpourings. As I built in time and endurance, it activated my unconscious more and became a form of automatic writing, which I did in guided settings with a healer in India. That was more a way to tap the unconscious, but I’ve also used automatic writing in a seance in my recent Hilma’s Ghost project. Different kinds of channeling. I’m a real believing skeptic. There’s this book called the Red Book by Jung which is a record through illustrations of his departure from ‘a rational state.’ I like to think all these alternative methods are connected to understanding the mind. The Blind Spot series eventually morphed into more Tantric compositions. I am interested in narrative in abstraction, one that is implied rather than depicted. Becoming more compositional was a way to explore that tendency. I wish I could just work on all these different series in parallel, but it becomes about time and capacity.
MH: Someday!
SR: Yes someday I’ll have different studios within a studio for drawing, painting, installations, everything! I’m definitely not linear at all.
MH: Me neither.
SR: Have you had instances of returning to bodies of work you've made in the past?
MH: I’ve got these four or five different bodies of work going. The first person perspective paintings, the paper works that represent and unpack historic textiles and a series of works that I call “from life” and are actually dealing with notions of memory through the photograph and immediate observational painting among others, they come in and out when the time is right. Each body of work functions like a check in for me to align with a certain way of seeing, a speed of mark making, a method of applying color - a logic in approach. They are different from each other, even though it all comes from me, they ultimately present themselves with different kinds of physicality. And in terms of visibility in the art world, I think it can be confusing for people. Whereas for me, striving for a singularity feels so dishonest, I’m just way more complex than that. I have different moods and want to work in a certain way sometimes and in another way other times. It can even be seasonal honestly, I love getting wet in dye baths in the summer for example. I really love giving myself freedom to do that. I think part of the benefit of teaching is that it is a way to be able to continue to experiment, to maintain curiosity and a questioning stance, I feel like it gives me that permission, teaching is such a privilege in that way.
SR: Walt Whitman said ‘I contain multitudes.’ It’s interesting that he was queer too. Not to limit it to the queer experience, but I do think there’s something in the queer condition that requires multitides. David Getsy has written that too [through the lens of queer abstraction]. I also think people who embody different cultures at the same time or at different intersections also think in terms of plurality. I find it very alien to my being to consider just one path.
MH: Me too.
SR: I think how you hold that plurality or a sense of multitudes is tricky in the art world. There’s still a dogma around the singularity of style that overrides the spirit of exploration. I agree that teaching keeps me honest too. I learn a lot from my students. For my own work, I’ve been trying to hold the formal and the sacred together in one space. Practicing divination openly through Hilma’s Ghost has been interesting. I always thought of my spirituality as something private. And now of course, I am doing seances and I said I drew the line at mediumship!
MH: Oh yes, (laughter) I know, I was going to ask, are you ever scared?
SR: Of ghosts? Well, I am from South Asia. We definitely believe in ghosts! I grew up with stories of ghosts that the elders would tell us and it was quite normal. I’ve had to keep an open mind though. Part of why the spiritual and the sacred has been exiled from western thinking is that it exists in this non-descriptive abstract space. I’m reading a book on magic right now and it's interesting that malign magic, which is the malevolent form of magic, is actually a very small aspect of witchcraft; but it’s what has received the most amount of attention. You have to think they were just going after women who were independent. It threatened and still threatens patriarchy. Hilma’s Ghost is a feminist project so it’s about undoing conditional ways of thinking for myself first. I do tend to get cognitive when I am in an unknown space; it’s balancing that cognition with going with the flow.
MH: I mean. It’s such a good and powerful tool, yes.
SR: It can be helpful. There’s so much we don't know. It’s kind of wild how the dots connected for us [in the Hill-Stead project]. Artists are also magicians in a way. We undergo these subtle transformations while we do our work. I’d love to have a parallel practice again to explore that through a different space, like kundalini, but again, it’s time and capacity. I also tend to go with my curiosities. I envy people who stick to one practice for 20 years. I’m a creature of change.
MH: You’re teaching at Parsons and Carnegie Mellon, right? Is that true?
SR: Yeah, teaching helps to clarify my own thoughts. I have been teaching a critical theory class for the past few years which privileges identity politics with respect to race, ethnic orientation, sexuality, gender, all the intersections! Being in the space of identity politics for two decades I’ve also moved closer to a sense of self and reclaiming joy. I also want to reclaim culture and feminist labor, so I do that through my titles now as a way to continue creating disruptions in the way that we are seen as BIPOC people. I used to get frustrated by the westernization of references that happens when someone looks at your work here. There are so many ways of recovering the way that we are seen and how our work is regarded. I’m not interested in being misrepresented through the fallacy of open interpretation of our work. We have so much to learn from the Black and Indigenous movements in this country. In the Blind Spot works as well as the more built up works I did on vellum later on, like The Night Is Dark and Full of Rainbows and the Cosmic Earth works in which I communicate labor through the process of automatic writing for 50 to 60 hours. I like the idea of endurance communicated through density…
Sharmistha Ray, The Night Is Dark and Full of Rainbows, 25 x 19 inches. 60 hours of automatic writing with colored pens on vellum, 2019
MH: I really appreciate the level of density that you arrive at and you kind of let it sit in the space where it's vibrating in a wholeness of form built through individual marks, or it can kind of shift depending on something like the time of day perhaps. I love your willingness to let everything in, it is not easy and I have huge admiration for your courage and diligent commitment to the way you contextualize your work on your own terms. How big are these?
SR: These are 19 by 25 inches so not very large. They're like sheets of paper and I like that idea of the illuminated manuscript, something that relates to the scale of my body. There’s 7 works in the Cosmic Earth series which required 350 hours of writing. I worked for 8 hours a day to finish them. It was a very meditative and distilled process. It helps to clarify thinking. I showed them during Asia Art Week a few years ago. It was Leeza Ahmady who is the founder and curator of Asia Art Week who encouraged me to think in a more nonwestern context about how to frame these through the use of titles. So if you look at the titles, there’s the presence of bhakt poetry and moments of Bengali script as well as taking for the form of a musical raga. I grew up learning classical music and the ragas are just a beautiful musical form, so connected to lived experience and times of day. It also allowed me to work sequentially, thinking about the movement from day to night. Wow, we have talked for so long as I haven’t even started talking about Hilma’s Ghost…
Sharmistha Ray, Cosmic Earth No. 3/7 (Chapters of the Day): Raag Asaveri (Late Morning), "Your skin as warm as pebbles on the beach / Noon-high sun/Manipura / Yellow-Pink" teen taal: 5'52, 25 x 19 inches. 50 hours of automatic writing with colored pens on vellum, 2018
MH: I know! I mean that’s Okay, that can happen in Part 2! It’s been such a pleasure to revisit your older works which I have long admired and to discuss your influences and roots, it’s all related. The Hilma’s Ghost project is incredible and has so much momentum, I’ve loved all the programming you are doing around the project, the collaborative nature of it. Maybe we can continue this conversation on our road trip with friend and artist Fariba [Alam] this fall, to the Hill-Stead Museum to see your Hilma’s Ghost show!
[*Sharmistha uses the birth name of their city, Calcutta, also known as Kolkata]
Meena Hasan (born 1987, NYC) received her B.A. in Studio Art from Oberlin College in 2009 and her MFA in Painting and Printmaking from Yale School of Art in 2013, where she won the Carol Schlosberg Memorial Prize for Painting. In 2010, she was awarded the Terna Prize Affiliated Fellowship at the American Academy in Rome. She has participated in numerous group exhibitions domestically and internationally including the 'Bosch Young Talent Show' at The Stedelijk Museum, Den Bosch, The Netherlands, 'Good Pictures', curated by Austin Lee, at Deitch Projects, NYC, and the 2022 New England Triennial at the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum and Fruitlands Museum. Recent solo exhibitions include 'Mangiferin Chintz' at LAUNCHF18, NYC and 'Covering as much of the sky' at RISD's Memorial Hall Gallery, Providence, RI. Meena is currently Assistant Professor in Painting at RISD and lives and works in NYC.
www.meenahasan.com @I_meen_ah
Sharmistha Ray (they/them) is a Brooklyn-based artist, art critic, and educator. They use interdisciplinary methods and make paintings, drawings, sculptures, and installations to explore themes of intimacy and connection through the lens of queerness and abstraction. In 2020, they co-founded Hilma’s Ghost, a feminist artist collective that engages in collaborative research, exhibitions, and pedagogy. They have participated in 50+ exhibitions internationally, including the solo exhibitions (both independently and with the collective) RADICAL SPIRITS: Tarot, Automatism, and Feminist Histories at Hill-Stead Museum, Farmington, CT (2022); ABSTRACT FUTURES TAROT at The Armory Show, New York, NY (2021); and we are all islands I and II in Mumbai and Kochi (2016-2017). Ray is the recipient of notable awards including a Joan Mitchell MFA Grant (2004) and their work has been reviewed in The New York Times, Artnet, and Hyperallergic, amongst others. Their writings have appeared in notable publications including Where Is Art?: Space, Time, and Location in Contemporary Art (Routledge, 2022). Currently, they teach at Parsons School of Design and Carnegie Mellon University. Ray received a dual degree M.F.A. in Painting and M.S. in Theory, Criticism, and History of Art, Design, and Architecture from Pratt Institute.
www.sharmistharay.com, www.hilmasghost.com @sharmistharay, @hilmasghost