Avantika Bawa

Region: Pacific Coast

Website: http://avantikabawa.net/

City / State: Portland, OR

My interventions put the act of drawing into the service of sculptural design so that handmade gestures intimately connect to architectural supports. This emerges due, in part, to my relationship to the legacy of Minimalism and its emphasis upon reductive form, modularity and literal scale. My approach explores the balances or imbalances between wholeness and fragmentation, gravity and suspension, or containment and dispersal. Banal materials and actions become fodder for these works that initially allude to logic and function, but come to highlight serendipitous disjunctions and architectural oversights.

These pieces reflect the regional, cultural and geographic influences of the time and space in which I am working. I define a new territory that allows for subtlety, anti-monumentality and unexpected levels of candor. Perhaps this comes from my ability to navigate the borders between sculpture and painting, reticence and ambition, Punjabi and English.