Several years ago, I began mixing colors with medical syringes.  The attempt to quantify and document my process is a comedic defense against my dependence on vision.  In the unlikely event that I lose my sight, I can at least dictate my paintings and their colors via numerical codes.  Such recording and mediation might provide a strange stability in the fleeting realm of appearances and experience.

Most recently, I have been working on a set of fade paintings.  These are paintings whose patterns appear to fade away or disappear into the painting's ground color.  The illusion looks like the effect of a translucent airbrush or painterly spill, reminding one of flashes of after-image or fog obscuring a view.  Despite the immediate gestalt of the paintings, they ultimately reveal their illusion, created slowly and deliberately, one handmade pixel at a time.  I mix dozens sometimes more than a hundred subtly shifting colors to create these "digitized" illusions.  I am currently trying to make fade paintings whose ground colors remain partially exposed.  Exposing the ground is a challenge for me; I battle my own compulsion towards resolution.   

 

In earlier diptychs, I would visually dissect a spontaneously poured or brushed painting, analyzing the complex color shifts and then replicating the painting in a laborious copy.  The fade paintings are an attempt to unify these earlier diptychs; the opposition of semi-accidental painterly bleeds and deliberate fragmentation are combined in a single painting.  The recent paintings also intimate accident in their freehand gestures and compositions, despite their precision.  I like the surprise in unraveling my control.

My influences are multiple.  As a second generation Bangladeshi-American, my background has informed my interest in decoration, repetition, and even discipline; the modular asterisk and tripod shapes are derived from Islamic tile geometry.  But also find here reference to Los Angeles skies, unresolved computer screens, optical painting, and the systems of early conceptual art.

My works are as much about the biases of human vision and ambition as they are about their potential.  The use of modular color and shape mimics the laborious and sometimes absurd fragmentation of experience inherent in our human attempts to control and represent.