Sangeeta Reddy "Garden of the Gods#2"

My obsession with rock formations and landscape of the Front Range and the Colorado Plateau is a result of the keen loss of landscape I felt in my childhood. The iconic rocks of Hyderabad were dynamited away in the wake of rampant growth. In the drawing of these I try to compensate for that earlier loss.

During Covid, as all our movements were restricted, I found myself working mostly from photographs. Both mine, and what I could find online, sometimes promotional, of places I wished I could travel to and see for myself. They were images of mountains and deserts, of rock formations of the front range and from around from my own neighborhood. 

As a daily practice, I made small ink line drawings. After doing a number of them, my larger paintings began to reflect their contours rather than geometric planes. The washes and layered brushwork began to reflect the flow of sedimentary rocks which are shaped by millennia’s worth of compression and erosion. 

Another feature grew out of this isolation. The formations I portrayed became objects isolated from their surroundings, rather than as previously, a continuation of them. I noticed that the compositions had become the centralized ones of eastern religious icons that persist today on the street and household shrines and temples. 

Between 2011 and 2018, my landscape work followed modernistic western landscape traditions and trajectories, and my own colonial education. These new works seem to part ways from that.