In my recent work on projects such as How to be a Monster, Bedtime Stories of White Supremacy, and #NewGlobalMatriarchy, I have harnessed my research interests (women of color feminist perspectives, black studies, post-colonialism, queer theory, etc.) to create work that infiltrates our cultural vernacular with radical imaginations of the future. The catalyst for this new work was How to be a Monster, where I performed as a series of Hindu goddesses who had become incarnated in our present culture. There is a long history of imagining the “other” as a monster, from medieval European accounts of South Asian art as “monstrous” up to Darren Wilson describing Michael Brown as looking like a “monster” in his grand jury testimony. Often, queer, female, and mixed-race bodies are viewed through the lens of monstrosity.

The goddesses inhabit this space of monstrosity (the realm of the outcast, the foreign, the abject, the criminal), inhabiting the imagination of the dominant culture (capitalist, white supremacist, cis-hetero-patriarchal), but queering that imagination, using the position of the monster as a place of power and agency, bringing the sublimated fears of the dominant culture to the surface so that its power might be undermined and ultimately dismantled. The images produced are a collapse of history, where traditional South Asian painting styles collide with signifiers of race, class, and popular culture. Like the common and inexpensive prints of goddesses that these images reference, they are bright and immediately legible, but that immediacy quickly dissolves into a network of references and allusions that open up questions about power and identity.

The project continues with Bedtime Stories of White Supremacy and #NewGlobalMatriarchy where the Goddesses exit the imaginative space of the works on paper and out into the world, making friends and allies along the way, causing trouble and rethinking revolution.

In my recent work on projects such as How to be a Monster, Bedtime Stories of White Supremacy, and #NewGlobalMatriarchy, I have harnessed my research interests (women of color feminist perspectives, black studies, post-colonialism, queer theory, etc.) to create work that infiltrates our cultural vernacular with radical imaginations of the future. The catalyst for this new work was How to be a Monster, where I performed as a series of Hindu goddesses who had become incarnated in our present culture. There is a long history of imagining the “other” as a monster, from medieval European accounts of South Asian art as “monstrous” up to Darren Wilson describing Michael Brown as looking like a “monster” in his grand jury testimony. Often, queer, female, and mixed-race bodies are viewed through the lens of monstrosity.

The goddesses inhabit this space of monstrosity (the realm of the outcast, the foreign, the abject, the criminal), inhabiting the imagination of the dominant culture (capitalist, white supremacist, cis-hetero-patriarchal), but queering that imagination, using the position of the monster as a place of power and agency, bringing the sublimated fears of the dominant culture to the surface so that its power might be undermined and ultimately dismantled. The images produced are a collapse of history, where traditional South Asian painting styles collide with signifiers of race, class, and popular culture. Like the common and inexpensive prints of goddesses that these images reference, they are bright and immediately legible, but that immediacy quickly dissolves into a network of references and allusions that open up questions about power and identity.

The project continues with Bedtime Stories of White Supremacy and #NewGlobalMatriarchy where the Goddesses exit the imaginative space of the works on paper and out into the world, making friends and allies along the way, causing trouble and rethinking revolution.

In my recent work on projects such as How to be a Monster, Bedtime Stories of White Supremacy, and #NewGlobalMatriarchy, I have harnessed my research interests (women of color feminist perspectives, black studies, post-colonialism, queer theory, etc.) to create work that infiltrates our cultural vernacular with radical imaginations of the future. The catalyst for this new work was How to be a Monster, where I performed as a series of Hindu goddesses who had become incarnated in our present culture. There is a long history of imagining the “other” as a monster, from medieval European accounts of South Asian art as “monstrous” up to Darren Wilson describing Michael Brown as looking like a “monster” in his grand jury testimony. Often, queer, female, and mixed-race bodies are viewed through the lens of monstrosity.

The goddesses inhabit this space of monstrosity (the realm of the outcast, the foreign, the abject, the criminal), inhabiting the imagination of the dominant culture (capitalist, white supremacist, cis-hetero-patriarchal), but queering that imagination, using the position of the monster as a place of power and agency, bringing the sublimated fears of the dominant culture to the surface so that its power might be undermined and ultimately dismantled. The images produced are a collapse of history, where traditional South Asian painting styles collide with signifiers of race, class, and popular culture. Like the common and inexpensive prints of goddesses that these images reference, they are bright and immediately legible, but that immediacy quickly dissolves into a network of references and allusions that open up questions about power and identity.

The project continues with Bedtime Stories of White Supremacy and #NewGlobalMatriarchy where the Goddesses exit the imaginative space of the works on paper and out into the world, making friends and allies along the way, causing trouble and rethinking revolution.

In my recent work on projects such as How to be a Monster, Bedtime Stories of White Supremacy, and #NewGlobalMatriarchy, I have harnessed my research interests (women of color feminist perspectives, black studies, post-colonialism, queer theory, etc.) to create work that infiltrates our cultural vernacular with radical imaginations of the future. The catalyst for this new work was How to be a Monster, where I performed as a series of Hindu goddesses who had become incarnated in our present culture. There is a long history of imagining the “other” as a monster, from medieval European accounts of South Asian art as “monstrous” up to Darren Wilson describing Michael Brown as looking like a “monster” in his grand jury testimony. Often, queer, female, and mixed-race bodies are viewed through the lens of monstrosity.

The goddesses inhabit this space of monstrosity (the realm of the outcast, the foreign, the abject, the criminal), inhabiting the imagination of the dominant culture (capitalist, white supremacist, cis-hetero-patriarchal), but queering that imagination, using the position of the monster as a place of power and agency, bringing the sublimated fears of the dominant culture to the surface so that its power might be undermined and ultimately dismantled. The images produced are a collapse of history, where traditional South Asian painting styles collide with signifiers of race, class, and popular culture. Like the common and inexpensive prints of goddesses that these images reference, they are bright and immediately legible, but that immediacy quickly dissolves into a network of references and allusions that open up questions about power and identity.

The project continues with Bedtime Stories of White Supremacy and #NewGlobalMatriarchy where the Goddesses exit the imaginative space of the works on paper and out into the world, making friends and allies along the way, causing trouble and rethinking revolution.