REUBEN SINHA

ARTIST STATEMENT:

My work is about the internal effects of memory, identity and race politics. Traversing those boundaries, cultures gained and cultures lost, and sensations across time and space are continual themes in my work.   I left India at age eight, and ever since, have worked to reconcile what has been lost and found.  My work is a continual meditation on memory, the body and space we inhabit. By thinking of the womb, our childhood homes and play spaces, or our skin, as shells we envelope ourselves in, I use color and clay to recreate these primitive spaces.

My current ceramic work focuses on bodies as vessels that breathe. I prefer hand-building as it brings imprecision to create organic forms.  My craft involves a ‘pinching & blending’ technique started in the Neolithic period. Instead of hiding the seams, I exaggerate them as a visible spine that spirals upwards much like the spine on a wood screws spiral around its cylindrical body. The process is instinctive and developed with the hand as much as the intellect. The materials and the craft dictate my growth. Sometimes I can repeat the same clay building methods for years before an unconscious change in my methods and results. The act of repetition is essential, it balances intent and gives room for an egoless and unselfconscious expression of form. I finish my pieces in colors and textures that maintain a direct connection to the earth from places I've been.

My process with wax is very different from that of working with clay. In 2018, I began a series of brown encaustic color studies to explore the possibilities of a single color’s expression. The series is a response to mass disenfranchisement under Trump and growing xenophobia against brown skin. Brown is beautiful, despite the fact that some may view it as dirty; the outsider, the enemy. Sinha began these color studies by mirroring the skin of the NYC public school students he taught. He included their names in the artwork titles, creating the only point of reference for the otherwise enigmatic fields of brown. By layering and blending loving and hateful associations to ‘Brown’, Sinha has developed a personal meditation on Otherness. These meditations on ‘Brown’ incorporated expressions of isolation, anxiety, and calm emerging from the COVID-19 pandemic. The Encaustic Brown Color Series continues to develop new ways of thinking about brown as delicate, elegant and inclusive.