Bodhi Art, New York is proud to announce an exhibition of works by renowned artist, Jayashree Chakravarty, titled `Where The Sand Meets the Sky.’ In this series of fourteen works, Chakravarty creates elaborate maps of consciousness. The pictorial language of her works reflects her deepening inquiry into the secret life of memories, their pervasiveness and intensities. Disparate worlds are layered together with great panache – the effect of pigments, texture, personal and historical connotations, and the imagistic registers are orchestrated together in a magical network that creates a telling language of associations.

Chakravarty was born in Kolkata (Calcutta), India and now lives in Paris. Her works of acrylic on canvas as well as mixed media on paper are born out of the encounter between distinct worlds that co-exist even as they are dragged out of their contexts. On one canvas a castle stationed inside diagrammatic heads acquires a landscape of huts. On another canvas she creates an elaborate townscape materializing beyond knolls composed of seismic tremors layered by a series of concentric suns. Ducks, sparrows, beetles, butterflies, spiders, and trout acquire an iconic presence – as crucial as the diagrammatic human figures that populate the picturescapes.

Over the past two decades, there has been an unbroken progression of thought and application in her works. For many years, Chakravarty’s paintings presented a singular, consistent imagery. From her earliest works of surreal social groupings into her installations of double-sided collage and paintings on paper, the artist seemed entirely focused on a stationary target. In this series, there is a shift and one can discern a few different worlds being portrayed in her paintings. There is a more complicated engagement between the human, animal, and vegetal worlds and between the constructed architectural forms and the haphazardly structured impressions. Expanding the color palette from her signature slate-grays and sepias she includes luminous umbers and siennas. She also experiments with the application of paint, scraping of layers and dabbing together acrylic paint and turpentine.

In conclusion, Chakravarty’s maps are both lush and spare – definitions dissolve and re-emerge, lines shadow and close in on images, and spaces extend into each other’s domains. Chakravarty mixes abstraction with human figures that summons up a landscape mired in mystery replete with vibrant inter-penetrative elements and orbits.