Bio
Samanta Batra Mehta's work has been exhibited at art galleries and museums in the US and abroad including at the Queens Museum of the Arts, the Hudson River Museum, the Hunterdon Museum, the Taubman Museum of Art in the US, Fotografia Cassa di Risparmio di Modena and Museo d'Arte Orientale in Italy and at ‘Reading Room’. Her works are included in various art collections including at Fondazione Fotografia Cassa di Risparmio di Modena in Italy, the RPG Group, India, The Jindal Collection, India, the Birla Art Foundation, India. She has been the recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation's Painters & Sculptors Grant Award, the SqW:Lab Fellowship, the Gradiva Award and others. She holds a Master of Science degree from The London School of Economics, UK. She lives and works in New York.
Artist Statement | Legacies of Crossings
With intricate mark-making, altered images and found objects, my work explores themes in identity, memory and migration. I examine cultures of temporality and discontinuity in the movement of people, as well as the internal subjectivities of belonging, rootedness and routed-ness.
The multi-layered artwork I make is a commentary on the human condition and the environment we inhabit. Themes in identity, personal history, gender constructs, socio-political order and colonial history are depicted and debated in my layered artistic interventions that employ drawing, found objects, text, photo and installation. In a contemporary re-imagining of the ‘exquisite corpse’ genre, I oftentimes re-purpose collected antiquarian objects, imagery and texts along with my own drawings to render an altered visual engagement in an attempt to construct a reimagined history. In my visual vocabulary, the human form and anatomical imagery is intertwined with foliage and nature.
Nature/land/landscape is seen as a metaphor for the body (and vice-versa) and as a site for germination, nourishment, degradation, trespass, plunder, colonization and transgression.