Artist’s statement:
As an artist and a filmmaker, I am confronted by the word Autobiographical. Auto means for or by oneself and Biography is a written account of a person’s life. Self–Portraits with Masks is an investigation into what makes me, “Me”, and how distinct is it from others. Is it the lopsided image staring back from the mirror; the poses I strike, attitudes I assume, opinions I proffer, or is it something inviolate, intrinsic to me, and only me, like a fingerprint.
The more I seek myself, the more I find others. The roles I play in my own stories and the selves I see reflected in the stories of others. Constantly changing, shifting, transforming, evolving, negotiating and renegotiating the “Self”, I go through life collecting images, influences, attitudes, and making them my own.
The masks I discover within, hint at the idea that perhaps “Me” is shape shifter; a composite of various fragments and reflections. Putting these fragments in order, arranging them over and over, then, is the stuff of stories; my personal story, an “Autobiography”, however fictional.
BIOGRAPHY:
A multi media artist, Alka Raghuram is from India, currently living in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her Experimental short films Tired of Dancing and Panchali have screened at various festivals in the US and abroad. Panchali received the John Gutman award for innovation in cinema and was a regional finalist in the Student Academy Awards (2004).
She recently completed MFA in cinema from San Francisco State University. The Ant and The Monkey, her thesis film (finished Jan 2007), was nominated for the Princess Grace Award in 2005, and received the Emerging Arts Fund fellowship from The Peninsula Community Foundation in 2006.
She is currently working on a documentary about coping with grief and loss after the 2004 Tsunami in the Andaman and Nicobar islands off the southeast coast of India, and the series of paintings “ Self Portraits with Masks”.
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