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ABOUT

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GRAPHIC DESIGN

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PAINTING

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SCULPTURE

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VISUAL NARRATIVE

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@bu_visualarts

@bu_graphicdesign

@bostonpainting

@pmp.bu
@bostonsculpture
@buvisualnarrative

@sid.art.shah

he/him

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Sidharth Shah

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My graphite drawings and watercolor paintings explore the impact of humans on the flora and fauna of the world today. Human greed and apathy threaten a million known plant and animal species with extinction and are causing widespread ecosystem imbalances. In my art, I capture endangered creatures representationally using exaggeration, disintegration, and distortion of line and form, to emphasize the adverse impact of their possible eradication. 

My drawings are made on reclaimed packing paper that I used for a move in 2011. Uncrumpled and delicate, the ephemeral quality of this substrate reflects the frail and fragile condition of my subjects. In contrast, my paintings are made on acid free paper, and I use watercolor to consider the nature of impermanence. Watercolor is demanding, as every brush stroke is indelible, yet its fugitive pigments and organic fibers require care to be preserved. The act of drawing or painting then becomes a metaphor for ecological holism: line, form, and color, behave like organisms that I orchestrate into a harmonious visual ecosystem on the surface of my work, thereby implicating me through my own hand.

Recently, I have been drawn to depicting the psychosis that wild animals experience under captivity. Zoochosis goes against millions of years of evolution and my art captures the psychological elements of space, barriers, and behaviors that captivity imposes. This is an emotionally distressing subject that requires commitment and insistence to create sensitive paintings that blur the boundary between art and activism. 

I use varying degrees of layering, transparency, amalgamation, scale, and abstraction to draw out metaphors based on ecological food web dependencies and inter-species relationships. My ambition is that the viewing experience of my art transcends the visual and moves into the visceral and emotional realms, where humans might be inspired to nurture compassion, resist apathy, and re-consider humanity’s onus towards the planet and its 8.7 million species. 

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