Neerja Kothari

Region: Northeast

City / State: jersey city , NJ

My work investigates the absurd. It is an attempt to quantify an unquantifiable experience, inspired by the time I spent in physical rehabilitation recovering from motor sensory neuropathy in Kolkata, India. I had to relearn every movement that my brain had forgotten. The process was slow and fragmented: every movement was broken down to its smallest bit. And then, bit by bit, I formulated the bigger ideas. The work, then, emerges as an exploration of large existential questions.

Derived from multiple instants and memories, my paintings are an accumulation of time, labor, process, memories, marks, and numbers. Each element plays a part in its own investigation, like a clock quantifying time, or a metronome measuring music. My brain forgot things I learned in my first score of years, and I had to retune the muscle memory to an instructional rhythm. The distilled instructional methodology in the work reiterates that process of re-building and re-tuning and re-learning.