Chitra Ganesh with Megan Liberty, Brooklyn Rail, July 2020
Brooklyn-based artist Chitra Ganesh works across media, including drawing, collage, comics and printmaking, animations, videos, and immersive installations. Her figurative work is both formally and conceptually rigorous, drawing on Indian myths and legends, 1960s and 1970s comics, science fiction, pulp movie posters, modernist literature, and subway graffitti. On the occasion of Ganesh’s upcoming site-specific installation, the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art’s QUEERPOWER commission, which will cover the street facing windows of the museum, we talked about this moment of rethinking public space and public monuments, the way comics are uniquely equipped to represent this time of rupture and isolation, modernist narrative strategies, and reimagining archives.
MEGAN N. LIBERTY (RAIL): You work with a wide range of media—video and animation, di!erent kinds of printmaking including linocuts and screenprints, thread, weaving, and even sometimes glitter. Could you talk about your approach to materials?
CHITRA GANESH: It began with more traditional forms of collage, partly generated by collecting materials that weren’t easily found in the US, and that had a di'erent kind of visual language. When I was younger I loved fantasy book covers, psychedelic posters, and album covers and sleeves. On trips to India over the summers, I encountered miniature paintings and statues that were thousands of years old alongside advertisements for everyday products, political graffitti, painted and silkscreened movie posters, magazines, and comic books. I would bring those things home and start to think with them through the process of collage. It was that impulse to assemble in a way that allowed the incorporation of everyday materials and print culture into my work more easily—it took longer for me to integrate the collage aesthetic with painting. There’s an immediacy that connects the process of drawing and collage. Both an object’s irreducible material qualities and a mark made of ink on a piece of paper cannot be erased—they have a similar sort of synergy. This method was also influenced by teaching children and witnessing the elasticity of how they orient themselves to and approach objects with a very thin line between the everyday and the fantasy. Suddenly, a cotton ball can become a cloud—and it really can hold the presence of a cloud.
Portrait of Chitra Ganesh, pencil on paper by Phong H. Bui.