While comics typically tell stories with a linear structure, Chitra Ganesh utilizes the popular format to create open-ended images that reflect on her personal life experiences as well as elements of her Indian heritage and Brooklyn upbringing. She works with digital collage, painting, and installation, creating multilayered narratives with multiple meanings. In her comic-inspired work, she utilizes text for poetic streams of consciousness rather than for expounding plot or dialogue.
Ganesh’s goal, she describes, is to excavate “buried narratives and marginal figures typically excluded from official canons of history, literature, and art” by cobbling together Eastern and Western influences and filtering them through her personal mythos. Gender, power, and sexuality are themes that frequently come up for her.
Ganesh currently has an exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum titled “Chitra Ganesh: Eyes of Time.” If you’re in New York, this evening Ganesh has an artist talk and short film screening at the Brooklyn Museum.
