Natessa Amin - Feed the Moon

Natessa Amin's newest series of paintings and works on paper explores themes of memory, mysticism, ritual, and place. Embracing her transcultural identity as a lens — she is a child of the Indian diaspora brought up in Pennsylvania — Amin has developed an ever-growing lexicon of symbols alluding to notions of creation and destruction that she employs in these works to emphasize regenerative processes and cycles of healing.

An awareness of the changes our bodies undergo was of interest to Amin early in life. Physical scars, like one which she received as an infant from a fall, became signifiers of transformation and the manifestation of bodily experience. Her images employ techniques similar to those used by medical professionals, such as masking, scraping, cauterizing and sculpting layers of paint. Like scar tissue, these paintings emphasize transition and growth that heal over remnants and residues of the past.

The title of her exhibition, "Feed the Moon", is a metaphor for self-revelation and consciousness raising drawn from the philosophical writings of G.I. Gurdjieff. Gurdjieff held a mystical interpretation of the reciprocal relationship between the earth and the moon, believing that their separation during a period of early celestial creation was a trauma, which through the equilibrium of their orbits ultimately achieved a peace. When we feed the moon we navigate personal conflict in order to find a place of equilibrium within ourselves and with others.