MFA VISUAL ART
Shruti Shankar
This search for the “moment of disobedience” also guides her material choices. In her charcoal accordion books, Shankar renders photographs of her own body, abstracting the figure until it is transformed into an ambiguous landscape that blurs the edges between self and world. She cuts into these drawings with a knife—a “violent but meditative” repetitive action where muscle memory takes over, severing the image in order to create new forms. This dedication to physical repetition extends to her large wall installation, a visual timeline documenting the daily motion of climbing and descending her apartment stairs.
Shankar further explores the limits of control in her mixed-media works by trapping hair between vellum to create “involuntary drawings.” The hair possesses a fluidity the artist cannot fully contain. By embroidering these forms with red thread to evoke flesh and veins, she navigates the tension between the organic found contour and the rigid drawn line. Alongside video work that bridges micro and macro perspectives, her art ultimately reveals that while rules offer comfort, it is the breaking of them that allows for true transformation.
— Christy Sher, OSU Department of History of Art, PhD Student