Symrath K Patti

Artist Statement

When I started this work the flow of mark making started shaping the images, charcoal smooth brittle black with shades of grey appeared in the form of eyes.. The density of lines was deep black Ink rolled on flat glass absorbed onto white paper lines scribbled shapes appeared. Wanting to expand on an idea of language and gender-neutral relationships. I was asking, where are the equalities between the sexes and how does it manifest in my experience through scripture and our everyday engagement within culture?

It’s the entanglement in the language of the senses that it starts with embodiment a play on our being through emotions and transcendence. The emotions maybe about love, anger, violence, hate in our collectiveness where the body holds the emotions and shapes our being. I articulate the experience through the space of the wounded in us, women, and men, it bleeds through shadows of my being sensing the pain I carry as the Other in me.

I use materials such as henna, my wedding sari, my mother’s embroidered garments, just marking her struggles and her prayers and my father’s pain and his prayers, growing up within the Sikh faith and the experience of marriage, not just mine, but within the community.

There’s love that transcends into accepting our frailty as human. We our taught that there is no separation between men and women. He surrenders to the guru and his persona to her, the goddess “Bhagautee” it is through her that he trancends and she is supposed to embrace him to eternity till the hunter in him is tamed, his ego melts where he embraces the goddess, surrendering to her. But somewhere within all the poetic beauty of message through the scriptures, the reality is difficult to

hold. It is difficult to fathom this image in a dominate colonial, patriarchal, racist, and sexist society. For me this is an ongoing project. It is representation from the imagination a metaphorical journey that’s a play on the transcendence through my engagement with the scriptures and culture and my subjectivity in it. In my imagination there is no stillness the object is moving capturing a moment where memory continues to shift and change. Like the camera it captures moments that are shifting speaking to us drawing us into a mindscape, a metamorphosis transiting into extension of vision which engages us through race location and where the body mirrors a pool of subliminal intervention through which we create a sense of being in which images carry us. Everything is moving shifting changing and living.

Throughout making this work I have questioned the notion of the gaze, who’s gaze do we perform too? Who do we carry as part of our ancestral histories beside our families? As I have said this is an ongoing project. She is the subject that has been objectified through history. In the Gurbani words empower women and endanger men perhaps but duality of the reality we live in culturally is very patriarchal.