Home is a complicated place for Anoushka Mirchandani. The India-born, San Francisco-based painter — currently an artist in residence at Silver Art Projects in New York City — has recently returned to the Bay Area for her first solo museum show, My Body Was A River Once, at the Institute of Contemporary Art San José. Here, Mirchandani transmutes transience and diasporic experience into four distinct bodies of work: medium- to large-scale oil-on-canvas paintings, paintings on silk organza, wooden and glass sculptures, and an audio installation.
The first gallery in the exhibition features eight paintings that blend Mirchandani’s signature and spare figurative style with her recent exploration of landscape painting. Her nude female subjects wander and recline amidst foliage and bathe in pools of water, immersed in the landscape to the point of becoming indistinguishable. Body parts fade in and out of the natural surroundings. The background of the painting overtakes a figure’s form in some places, the figure breaks from its environment dramatically in others.
Often, these wanderers are solitary. In All Us Come Cross the Water, a group of women bathe together in a mountain lake — or perhaps it is a single figure, seen at different moments in time.
Mirchandani has long painted these types of figures: outlined in oil stick, blending with their environments, a play between background and foreground creating a dynamic visual and conceptual motif. Previously, the majority of her settings have been architectural — balconies, bedrooms, doorways. Here, her figures blur and meld with their surrounding landscapes more seamlessly than in past work. Set loose from a built environment they once resisted or assimilated into, their disappearance into a nature now speaks to transience.
For Mirchandani, these figures reference apsaras, shapeshifting water spirits in Hindu and Buddhist mythology. Their supernatural mutability correlates to a diasporic sense of displacement and assimilation, a process of reinventing oneself in order to locate a sense of belonging.
