SUCHITRA MATTAI

My paintings, drawings and installations center on the general themes of identity and globalization through the trope of landscape. Drawing from memory, history, travel, and pop-culture, I employ bright bold colors and patterns to ignite otherwise barren, abstract, and often highly conceptualized landscapes. While these landscapes are unpopulated, their mountains, oceans, plains, and cities often bear the trace of human activity. The embroidered elements allude to the work of the “other,” referencing the creations of “women” and “sweat-shop workers.”

In my most recent body of work, entitled “The Intrepid Garden,” I investigate the nature of the “garden” as a site of decay and rebirth. The garden, as the cultivated place between the untamed woods and the domestic realm, acts as a space of mediation. It can be nurtured, maintained, and controlled, but has the potential to become over-grown, unruly, and unkempt.

As nature bears its force, the garden transforms from a peaceful haven to an inhospitable wilderness. But, historically speaking, the gardener’s effort to manipulate and control our natural world has often, if not always, been accompanied by a tacit recognition of the aesthetic primacy of nature itself. Nature is at once to be mastered and to be mimicked.

Through the creative process of mimesis, the floricultural arts reenact the awful powers of nature by rendering them on a more palatable, more human scale. And so the garden comes to epitomize the delicate interplay between natural or “raw” creative forces on one hand, and specific cultural interests and ideologies on the other. As the eighteenth-century scholar, C. C. L. Hirschfeld, observed, the garden offers an unparalleled window into the cultural, philosophical and political attitudes of an age.

I received an MFA in painting and drawing and an MA in South Asian Studies, both from the University of Pennsylvania.   I was also awarded fellowships to study at the Royal College of Art, London and at the American Institute of Indian Studies, Udaipur, India.  I have had solo and/or group shows in Philadelphia, Minneapolis, Denver, Austin, Berlin, and Wales.  My work has appeared in New American Paintings and is part of the Viewing Program of the Drawing Center, New York.  I teach at the University of Denver.