Chitra Ganesh | The Wolf Watcher's Dream Monoprints

Beginning with a watercolor monotype, artist Chitra Ganesh layers techniques such as screenprint, embroidery, and hand-painting to build her compositions in her latest series of monotypes titled The Wolf Watcher's Dream with Durham Press. The prints are simultaneously delicate, striking, and loose, inviting you to enter into the worlds Ganesh has created within her abstract landscapes. Vast washes of color act as a backdrop for Ganesh's screenprinted and embroidered imagery, accentuating the seemingly limitless horizons expanding beyond their boarders. Expressive heads emerge from the atmosphere, a diver is perched weightlessly above the ocean, diffusing a sense of space in these airy yet grounded dreamscapes.

This new series of monotypes expands upon Ganesh's recent show at Contemporary Calgary titled Astral Dance, the artist's first solo exhibition in Canada. Like these monotypes, her new exhibition features Ganesh's unique multimedia works - drawings, paintings, photography, and collage - which explore the relationship between the dream world and the lived world through a critical feminist lens. Depictions of the female form, often a reclining woman set against otherworldly backgrounds, recur in both Astral Dance and these new monotypes. In fact, the focal point of Ganesh's wall mural - similarly titled Wolf Watcher's Dream - features the same drawing of a woman that serves to recall and challenge the patriarchal structure of both art history and mythology. Ganesh continues to probe traditional culture through her repeated imagery, transplanting the same forms into new worlds and new perspectives.