Asha Ganpat

ARTIST STATEMENT

Decorous Violence

These lace pieces are part of Decorous Violence, my ongoing series about subjugation through etiquette. Lace carries with it the promise of restraint and etiquette, further promoting the masks as those of a gentle and righteous position. The violence is refined by the lacework, whose patterns become a meditation on savage coercion. A coercion wherein the knotted patterns represent internalized oppression and self-subjugation, ever satisfying societal expectations. These objects are expressions of the intimate cruelty and the tender brutality of society’s sanctioned viciousness.  

The series is comprised of Muzzle, Blinder, IDGAF, Full Mask and Gag. Mask covers the mouth, making the wearer complicit in her "voluntary" silence. Blinder obfuscates the eyes, rendering its wearer incapable of wielding the power of direct eye contact. IDGAF is a full face net with cursive letters across the middle of the face, a mark of complacency and disassociation. Full Mask was completed during the SHIFT intensive. It goes further than Blinder, blocking direct eye contact in addition to filtering out the wearer's entire ability to communicate through facial expressions. Gag was completed over the Covid-19 summer of 2020 in New Orleans. It is a t-shaped lace piece, it has five long feet of gag section and a strap that ties around the head. The length of the gag accumulates to a large mass when stuffed in the wearer's mouth. It is the embodiment of the spaces we hold for our own oppression.

Self-taught in bobbin lacemaking, I explore the lost art through ideas of socialization and hierarchy. Lacemaking is a painstaking process. A mistake cannot often be undone, and it is often related to the slow and precise activity of computer programming. The scale of the miniature weavings can belie their complexity and the magnitude of the undertaking. 

Do Not Touch

This piece is a human lure. It exposes the viewer to temptation, and dares them to do what they know they should not -- to touch the art object. It is made of wire lace, suspended, gold, glittering, humming and waiting. Truly, it is not interactive. I do not invite the viewer to touch it. If they do, the object will hurt them.

The work was inspired by a significant history of witnessing my non-interactive works being touched. I do what I can to receive this as a flattering gesture, that I had created something the viewer could not help but make physical contact with, but this piece is my response.

ABOUT THIS PAGE

This webpage provides both images and description to render a virtual experience of each artist’s work. Below is an image gallery that includes installation shots and details of Asha Ganpat’s sculptural works and video demonstrating how they are used. In-depth written descriptions that provide visual, contextual, and other sensory information are available below the image gallery. Audio recordings of this material are available through the SoundCloud embedded above.

IMAGE GALLERY & DESCRIPTIONS

INSTALLATION

This series of works are installed along a 19 foot wall at the back right side of the EFA Project Space Gallery. All five lace pieces, the Decorous Violence series, are hung at about 59” above the floor, and lit with very bright lights from a rail in the ceiling. This creates a luminous space, with the delicate shadows of the lace darkening the white walls. The work Do Not Touch (described below) hangs in the corner of the room above a white pedestal. On a small wall perpendicular to the lace works a monitor hangs vertically, playing a looped video of the artist demonstrating the various pieces as they can be worn.

Muzzle, 2018, linen bobbin lace. 

A white lace mask hangs pinned to a white gallery wall. When worn on the face, the mask can be worn as a muzzle by tying it over a person’s mouth. Affixed to each outside edge hangs a long lace strand, another two hang from the center bottom of the mask, which can be looped over the ears and around the wearer’s neck. The muzzle creates a similar shape to cupped hands or perhaps a jellyfish with a round top and four tentacles beneath its cap with four long tendrils. The tendrils, or strands of lace, twist slightly as they hang, showing rows of holes from which the lace has been made. The muzzle itself is laced together in a form that leaves airy spaces between the places where the lace is looped together while holding in place the tentacle-like outlines of fabric. At their fringes and in their meeting places, the textured loops of lacework look like highly sensitive hairs. At the bottom center of the muzzle, two tentacles curve outward before meeting at the bottom in a horseshoe or parentheses.

Full Face Mask, 2019, linen bobbin lace.

A white lace mask is affixed to a flat, thin metal headband, attached to a white gallery wall. When worn on the face, the headband circles around the wearer’s forehead, and the mask covers their face from forehead to chin. The mask is a four-sided diamond-like shape, made of a delicate lace lattice, with curved edges, creating a cloud-like structure. The lace is tied together loosely resembling a spider web or a net, becoming more dense in eight clusters evenly distributed across the mask. At the top and bottom, the lace pattern makes long thin shapes that are more sharp and jagged, which, especially at the bottom, near where a wearer’s mouth would be, bring to mind interactions between flesh and stitches. The shape of the mask is made clear by its shadow against the white wall, which resembles a three-tiered hanging chandelier. 

Gag, 2020, linen bobbin lace.

A white lace gag is pinned to a white gallery wall by its strap; the gag itself is a 5 foot strand of lace about 1.5” wide and dropping to the floor. The gag is tightly woven in a pattern that looks like snakeskin. It seems to spread outward from a recurring centerpoint that repeats along the strand, each of which resembles an eye. The gag ends in fringed strands of linen. The strand of the gag is very long; in a video that plays alongside the work in the gallery, it takes the wearer nearly 20 seconds to stuff the full contents into their mouth. The gag then ties around the head with a strap that is also tightly laced. The wearer also demonstrates taking the gag out of their mouth; threads of saliva connect their mouth and the gag at its end. 

Blinder, 2018, linen bobbin lace.

A white lace eye mask is affixed to a thin, flat metal headband, attached to a white gallery wall. When worn on the face, the headband circles around the wearer’s forehead and the lace hangs down in a rectangle, over the wearer’s eyes, ending somewhere along their nose. The lace is densely patterned to close the holes between the laces, forming the shape of eyes roughly where the wearer’s eyes would be so that the wearer cannot see past. From these shapes, the lace opens out into long tendrils, which resemble the way electricity is often depicted as a superpower in movies. These tendrils then reach out on either side to form a more uniform, net-like pattern. 

IDGAF, 2019, linen bobbin lace. 

A piece of white lace is pinned to a white gallery wall. The lace consists primarily of a net-like lace pattern that also resembles the pattern on a honeycomb. Laced into the center of this pattern in cursive writing is the phrase “IDGAF.” These letters appear in shadow on the wall behind the lace. When affixed to the face, these letters appear just below the wearer’s eyes. 

Do Not Touch, 2019, wire lace, metal, electricity.

A large gold metal ring hangs from a thread of gold metal wire, suspended above a white plinth. The wire extends from a spider’s web of laced wire, which frays out into long jellyfish-like tendrils or a mess of hairs. This web continues to extend up to the ceiling from a thicker metal wire attached to a black looped cord that hangs out of the wall, near the ceiling. A light buzzing sound emits from the sculpture. The tendrils and gold ring carry an electric current. 

ARTIST BIO

Asha Ganpat is a Trinidadian-American conceptual artist, born in Trinidad. Ganpat works in a wide range of traditional and non-traditional media including paper, lace, metal, gold, light and sound. Her work was cited as one of NYC’s top 10 art installations of 2012 by Complex Magazine. In 2017, Ganpat spoke at the Asia Society on the keynote panel of the South Asian American symposium "Fatal Love: Where Are We Now?" where she represented both East Indian and Caribbean diaspora. Currently, Ganpat is at the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, awarded a year-long residency program, concluding with an exhibition in November 2020. Ganpat has shown at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Exit Art, Noyes Museum, Queens Museum, Jersey City Museum and Nathan Cummings Foundation. She is an alumnus of Aljira's Emerge, Gaia’s Wonderwomen, the New Jersey Book Art Symposium, Chashama North, Chashama, SHIFT at the Elizabeth Foundation of the Arts, and Trinidad's Alice Yard residency. Ganpat is also a professor at Montclair State University, an independent curator, and co-founded Red Saw Gallery of Newark, NJ 2005 - 2008.