My practice examines the material, political, and conceptual possibilities in gestures of covering and revealing. Working across painting, installation, sculpture, and film, I explore art as a mode of public discourse, rather than being a private, self-contained discipline.

Raised in Hawai’i and of South Asian ancestry, I draw from academic and archival research, friendships and familial relationships, and extended tutelage under a range of makers—women doing kantha stitching in Bengal, rafoogars (darners) of Kashmir, lauhala weavers on O’ahu, and African American quilters of Gee's Bend. Enmeshing myself within these historically marginalized aesthetic traditions allows me to unwrap and challenge the structures upholding dominant epistemological hierarchies that are otherwise dependent on a stifling occlusion of embodiment and a willful erasure of feminine labor and indigenous knowledge(s).

As the primary ‘cover’ in our daily life, textile is often present in my work. The affinity that cloth has with the body—when used as garment, rag, swaddle, or shroud, when being produced through weaving, dyeing, piecing, and stitching, and when being circulated through complex networks of trade, gifting, and exchange—makes it a unique and layered site for the exploration of identity, sexuality, and labor. Hence, textiles can be seen as a drape or a wrap for the body of my subject or my artwork, as the support and subject matter of my painting, and as a surrogate for skin. Here the act of covering is articulated as simultaneously violent and tender, annihilative and creative, antagonistic and protective. Textiles in my practice therefore, become modalities through which to contend with human entanglements in histories of oppression and struggles for liberation. They also gesture to the ruptures in society, as well as the possibilities of mending, patching, and being quilted together in uncommon ways.

Through painting and film, I challenge long-standing Western conventions of depicting idealized, captive, and exploited bodies and landscapes. This often happens through a performance of excessive exposure and an intentional use of scale, repetition, nudity and, often, eroticism. As a result, I enact brown jouissance, defined by Amber Jamilla Musser as knowledge-producing sensuality and sexuality that resides within the fleshiness of a brown, femme body and exceeds the constraints of objectification constantly placed upon it. These acts of ‘revealing’, along with the leaning into the richness of non-Western textile traditions, become radical ways of resisting colonial and capitalist systems that deny black and brown bodies as agentive sites of pleasure, knowledge, and value.

My practice, thus, is exposing pre-existing historical, ideological, and material intimacies across the global South, while also making visible existing interdependencies between marginalized communities in the North. Through these revelations, my works imagine and create alternative solidarities and epistemic frameworks that can be used to cover, swaddle, and protect our angry, grieving, tired bodies as we dream of radically equitable futures which we can begin crafting today.