ayesha saeed-2013

artist’s statement:

I see “possibilities” now in the photographs I take. The work is heavily invested in an epiphany I had at the Art Institute of Chicago with Dutch Modernist Theo Van Doesburg’s painting Counter Composition VIII. It is essentially a white and black painting in a white room; it has an odd tilted framed that seemed to cause me to suddenly see the painting as if it were popping out of the wall like a pixel. This totally flat plane suddenly was like a window into another space with multiple white planes; just like the one I was in. In a moment, I had the experience of being unable to any longer precisely define what was real and what wasn’t.

It was so quiet, and so satisfying. I can only describe it as if I was suddenly liberated from some vast decimal system; a sense was granted that there’s more to what we see around us. We really can move through space, and deconstruct our habitual vision.

Visually, I have tended to be more of a micro- than a macro- person. I often get so immersed in a subject and magnify it so much that it becomes hard for me to look at it from a distance. But after this event something happened; I started producing work from the painting, and as if falling down a rabbit hole, I didn’t know where I was going. Things began to gel when the process took me back to a photograph I had taken in Lahore, Pakistan over a year ago.

I began realizing this experience I’d had with the Van Doesberg was something that had been hinted at in other moments, and that I’d been skirting these same insights or experiences in the past, including in this photo from Lahore. I began using and manipulating this photo to produce most of the works you see in my portfolio, amplifying and exploring the possibilities of this pixelated, mind-body insight.

My work revolves around this word ““possibility”. The writings of Agnes Martin, introduced to me by a professor, really helped me to make sense of my process and what I was seeing; they gave me full permission to just trust these strange-seeming intuitions, and explore them.

I’ve come to understand my work as a process of actually refining my awareness, and my self. I’ve passed through that boundary where I seem to realize it’s not just job/ hobby/work anymore. I guess you could call this process “spiritual”, though that seems limiting. It gives an unknown joy. It makes me value the everyday details of life’s light, and its shadows. The work is about the quietness of the repetitive patterns of our daily lives. It has its unique rhythm which I hear everywhere around me. I see strange systems of chaos and order around me; the beauty of monotony, yet the complexity of it at the same time. The pieces seem to allow me to focus, but then again push me back again so I can see from a distance: the tension of micro and the macro.

The investigation of the image that I am working with lead me to an interesting track which deals with Mughal emperor Aurangzeb, Mughal architecture, a French doctor and traveller François Bernier along with my own exploration of what square means to me. In nut shell, I Believe in Square and I am finding out my way through it.