TNT: What is the primary medium that you work in? 
Meena: I work primarily with inks, paints, and paper. Each piece usually starts with an ink drawing scratched into layers of Japanese paper with a bamboo or metal quill. The drawing is then coated with acrylic mediums and submerged in color pigment over time, a process that resembles batik textile dyeing techniques. Each step involves a permanent mark being made on the paper surface. My process mimics nature, fluctuating between controlled approaches and chance occurrences. There is a preciousness that is mediated and disrupted by bold moves such as a pour or a cut. I want the surfaces to be bodily, exuberant, psychosomatic terrains.

My works are informed by textile histories and methodologies, such as batik and kantha embroidery, and I enjoy investigating textiles through the medium of painting. Generally, I love playing with the definition of what a painting can be and find great pleasure in stretching the medium beyond its expectations by incorporating sensibilities and processes borrowed from drawing, textile, and sculpture. 

When I approach a painting, I lean into the productive enigma of taking an image into the sculptural. My compositions are site-sensitive and ask viewers to discover meaning by engaging with the work’s surface in pedestrian space; the works are social and change as you approach and walk around them. They are often two-sided, harnessed onto the architectures that surround them, implicating their spaces. Their entirety can’t be perceived all at once - to know a piece involves not only contending with it physically in the present but also holding the memory of it in your imagination. I hope to invite the viewer’s own subjectivity into the experience of the work. They never settle into a whole totality and instead exist in fragments of sensation that are in flux and sensitive to their subjective temporal and spatial contexts. 

TNT: Can you tell us more about the symbols and motifs that you use? 

Meena: I am drawn to symbols and motifs that relate to the politics and aesthetics of heritage. My work allows me to indulge my personal fascination with the cultural significances and tactility of texture, pattern, and color. The processes and forms I reference are sourced from my growing index of personal and historical textiles, patterns, and decorations found in systems of heritage, like the museum, educational models, the personal domestic sphere, and global economic trade, among others. Through this idiosyncratic research my work deals with ideas of desire, individualism, opportunity, competition, and alienation. 

The decorative is a field of art tied to systems of heritage and I am excited by its subversive potential. My works celebrate ornament, particularly that of South Asia. I playfully present an idea of a synthetic personhood, where objects are animated and shaped by their perpetual search for belonging and are positioned in relation to ongoing colonial, global, and immigrant histories.

An example: one on-going series references images of historic Chintz – a floral textile tradition from South Asia that became so popular among British and French colonizers that its exports took over the market, hurting European domestic revenue and causing the French empire to ban its sale in Europe. The desire for Chintz persisted however and Europe stole designs from South Asia and began producing their own mechanized iterations in Western factories. This industrialized production eventually extended to the factories along the coast of New England in the US that produced the cheap floral granny patterns now found littered throughout Goodwill and Salvation Army stores. The story of Chintz reveals shifts in desire and taste so much so that today, Americans use the word “chintzy” for kitschy or cheap, rather than the highly labor-intensive, sophisticated textile that it originated as in South Asia. I love playing with these textile narratives as something of a parallel to diasporic migration and belonging, where I was born and raised in NYC, largely because LBJ’s Immigration Act of 1965 helped enable my parents to move here.

The works on panel on view at the Open Studio event at TNT this month were inspired by a chintz textile that Tipu Sultan commissioned as his war tent featuring an array of acanthus flowers and vines, the same plant used for the design of the Corinthian column. The two large hanging paper works at the Open Studio are inspired by an 1870 kantha embroidered cotton coverlet from Bangladesh that features a tree of life design, soldiers, a Kingdom of Rats, European dresses, and numerous floral motifs. I borrowed these symbols in my works and interspersed them with images from my everyday life and travels including the NYC Parks leaf, Rodin’s sculpture of Isis, Courbet’s Origins of the Universe and a still-life drawing of a contemporary Kantha that my family owns. These two pieces were made simultaneously, and shapes are cut out of one surface and moved to the other – the compositions were intuitively constructed, finding a personal narrative of floating related forms, akin to the way that Kantha narratives are formed through communal stitching and recycled surfaces.

TNT: Can you tell us about your new works? 

Meena: At TNT, I had the amazing opportunity to spend the six months producing a large body of work for two exhibitions, one at the Old Stone House in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and the other at Main Window in Dumbo with Deanna Evans Projects, both currently on view. I was invited by Scholar-in-Residence Dylan Yeats to collaborate with him and his friend, Imran Khan, on a site-specific installation at the Old Stone House that connects America’s revolutionary war history with that of India, looking at US history through a global lens and with a broader understanding of its connectivity across continents. In these shows, I am wrestling with my relationship to the connections and contradictions of history, memory, and image.

The Old Stone House was the site of the Battle of Brooklyn, which was won by British commander General Cornwallis, who later defeated one of the fiercest opponents of colonialism in India, Tipu Sultan. Tipu was a notorious and powerful trickster figure who was particularly playful in his strategies, inventing rocket warfare in the region, tactics of diversion, strategic alliances with the French, and was also an avid art-lover, commissioning art forms such as Channapatna wooden toys. For the past ten years or so, I’ve been making works from Tipu’s treasure trove of objects.

For these two exhibitions I focused on three-dimensional objects such as his war helmet, bedchamber sword, and an assortment of tiger paraphernalia, including his throne finials. Many of Tipu’s objects were looted by the East India Company and housed in museums in the West such as the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and Wales’ National Trust Powis Castle. For Main Window in Dumbo, a street-facing large-scale window space across from the Brooklyn Bridge, I created a proscenium of works framing a large painting of the famous wooden sculpture Tipoo’s Tiger – an automaton instrument of a near-life-size tiger attacking a British colonial that when played enacts the tiger attack and wails of the soldier.

It has been such a blessing to work in TNT’s gorgeous studio in preparing for these shows. I made seven large painted paper works dealing with Tipu’s objects. The works are dramatic and theatrical, displaying staged subjects rendered vulnerable through processes of poured pigment and cut collage. I was particularly excited to reference figurative sculptures in these works and to lean into the symbol of the tiger - an animal that Tipu, known as the Tiger of Mysore, identified with strongly. It’s fascinating that the tiger, a symbol of colonial resistance for Tipu, has become a symbol of successful domination for the British as his items are now kept within Western museums, institutions, and private collections. Staging the performativity of these tigers has allowed me to highlight the fickle, malleable, and constructed nature of history. My works are a means for me to begin to learn history’s complicated interconnectivity.  

TNT: Do certain books, films, songs, or more influence any of your works? 

Meena: Yes, of course, there are many influences! Part of what is so wonderful about this stage in my art practice is that I can look back at my ongoing obsessions and understand them better; sometimes an influence can take a long time to reveal its significance in other words. Since I was a pre-teen I’ve been a big fan of horror comedies. Like 90s slasher films and TV shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the X Files. It’s my not-so-secret guilty pleasure. It might have started because the female character in Bram Stoker’s Dracula is named Mina and I read that extremely problematic book at far too young of an age. I am interested in how these fantastical narratives are able to describe human pathos, desires, fears, and ambitions with an exaggerated truth, thanks to the distance of fantastical characters who are physically shaped by their conditions. I think the kind of DIY body horror of monster movies and shows has been a means for me to better understand how an image can carry affect and illicit empathy, and build suspense. This kind of fictitious truth mediated by playful humor, I think, is something I’ve been recently bringing into the work with more intention, particularly as I was working with the absurd and ferocious character of the tiger in relation to the kingly tyrannical figures of Tipu and General Cornwallis. I think that humor is a way to transform fear into a tool for action, a motivator rather than something that can paralyze. 

Last year, I read child psychologist Winnicott’s theories about transitional objects, such as a blanket or toy that a child uses during the difficult phase of their development of separation from their primary caregiver. These objects are “transitional” and in a middle space between the child’s inner world and external reality as a means for their growth towards independence and autonomy. This complication and fluctuation between inner and outer worlds is something I see manifested also in horror comedies. It has also helped me to articulate how I hope my artworks function for myself as maker and also for my audience. Tipu’s tigers, both in my works and in their original forms, I think can be seen as sorts of transitional objects for the minds of both colonized and colonizer.   

TNT: Did art play a role in your upbringing, or when did you decidedly become an artist?

Meena: I was fortunate to travel often as a child, and split my time between New York City and Bangladesh throughout my childhood. This constant shift in location and social, political, and economic contexts led me to use artmaking as a way to ground myself. My work continues to be my tool in my ongoing search for belonging, to orient myself in time and in place and to connect my inner and outer worlds. 

I have always been an artist I think. But, I am the only artist in my family and it took me many years to understand how to build a life as an artist. I was, however, fortunate to grow up in close proximity to two strong creative thinkers and makers: the classical Indian musician and world-renowned sitarist Ustad Nishat Khan and the restorer and steward of the historic Etz Hayyim Synagogue in Chania, Crete, and prolific printmaker Nikos Stavroulakis. I feel so lucky to have been exposed to these two great minds and talents throughout my life, observing their relentless dedication and discipline showed me what it takes to craft a life-long practice of making and dedication to craft and history.

In terms of my visual influences, I grew up surrounded by a wealth of textiles, patterns, and decorations, particularly those from Bangladesh, including stone tilework, Jamdani muslins, Kantha embroidery and quilting, block-printed patterns, and other craft traditions distinct to Bengal. I identify these traditions as an inherent part of what shaped my aesthetic sensibility, as what defines my visual DNA. My memories are rooted in the colors, patterns, and textures of my surroundings, and I’ve always understood aesthetics as embodied and about sensation, something I hope to communicate visually through my paintings now.