I don’t necessarily have a favorite material to work with- I think I have a brief bias with each new material I introduce to my body of work simply because it is new and exciting. But after I figure out the material’s possibilities and limitations, it is fun to see how many iterations I can create with it. I would say that some of the plastics I have worked with have presented the greatest challenges; some plastics simply cannot be glued so I have had to come up with some more creative ways of connecting parts.
A Teaser of Mitra’s Work
This is probably not the wisest thing to say with galleries as part of my audience, but I never make work with sales as the primary motivation. The impetus has to come from a genuine source of curiosity and desire. So I never hold back on making something just because I know it probably won’t sell. I think it is part of the artist’s job to define what artwork a collector can or can’t consider “own-able.” Ten years ago people told me that no one would ever buy sculptures made from scotch tape, but they have been proven wrong. Sure, most of my work that sells tends to be the sculptures of more manageable sizes, but I soon hope to complete my first permanent installation in a residence. It takes not only artists willing to make such ephemeral work, but also collectors brave enough to think differently about how we live with and “collect” artwork. Luckily we have artists like Anish Kapoor, Ai Wei Wei, Tara Donovan, Anne Hamilton,and Phoebe Washburn forging new frontiers in installation work all the time.
I suppose I find most conventions of beauty boring. Sure, I won’t deny that a pretty face or a pretty flower is, well, pretty. But that determination is brief and superficial. As an artist I am more attracted to a defect or deviation from the norm. I am far more interested in my (or others’) reaction to “oh, that’s gross” and, more specifically, determining when one makes that transition from finding something beautiful to finding it repulsive. For example, some people might find that a woman who has had a breast enhancement and tummy tuck quite attractive, but it doesn’t take too many more procedures to turn that beautification into something disturbing.
afternoon
