Saanya Chopra: Living in the Question
The espresso machine’s hum wafts throughout the bookstore. Steam pours from my teapot’s spout; her iced coffee drops beads of sweat. Beside them is a plate covered in flakes of sesame seeds, whose shape maps the now-bellied spanakopita. Our laptops, lacking internet connection, go untouched. These are the things that lie between us. Artist, Saanya Chopra, sits across from me, looking up into the air and the recesses of her mind for answers. Our conversation pushes back and forth: on identity, translation, and their relation to linguistics, the poetics of images and the imagery of poetics. A smile cracks between her lips. As time moves on, we are unable to speak about some things and find roundabout ways to talk about others. When I asked to describe her artworks, she said that “they’re subtle and ambiguous.” This is the explanation she leads with after giving me so much more.
Saanya Chopra, carcass formation, oil on raw unstretched canvas, 39 x 33 inches, 2023.
Chopra’s description of her art is hardly coy or self-deceiving. There is a common language to her paintings, sculptures, and poetry. Her works often depict foliage in the natural process of growth or met with the after-effects of human involvement: The common relation is a natural thing (in)directly subject to a built environment. The ambiguity she speaks of is not boring repetition but is akin to sharing in kinds of relatable existences, like the familiarity of seeing a sprout break from concrete each spring or a tree stump felled by city maintenance. And yet, the banal familiarity should be associated with her art. By being inexact and having a loose referentiality, the ambiguity of Chopra’s subject matter builds, and our ability to recall our memories of such images is brought into question. Even when we find comfort in remembering the source of our thoughts, we linger on the subtle differences. This is the relationship I had with Chopra’s work before I learned that her quiet studies of nature are a delicate metaphor attuned to another experience altogether.
Saanya Chopra, fissure, oil on paper, 13 x 11 inches, 2024.
A scar bleeds down a stretch of cement skin. A rain-worn crack fills with yellow and white cigarette butts. These are the two paintings that make up the diptych fissure. When I first saw fissure nailed to the mortar of Chopra’s brick studio, I was reminded of my habit of going on walks. Their purpose is to break my addiction to seeping into the internet’s mind-numbing terrain. My ritual of walking after work is meant to refresh my mind, disconnect me from stressful tasks, and inhibit a doom-scrolling afternoon (that would eventually blend into the evening and then extend into the night). Alternately, there was something in viewing the sidewalk crack as an orifice that reminded me of my friend – and fellow poet – Kirsty MacLellan’s feminist killjoy attitude of unapologetically finding vaginas in art. The combination of ecology and femininity, I thought, was very Ana Mendieta-esque. Each of my self-reflections is a felt reaction to the work and a private moment of projection. From my musings came a desire to reflect on my relationship with Chopra’s artwork by spending time with the pieces and carving out moments to interview their creator.
Documentation. Courtesy of the artist.
During our first interview, I asked Chopra about her practice. She described her process as having “bouts of documentation,” where she takes photographs of quiet moments that welcome “ambiguity to project imagery” for when she creates her paintings. Admittedly, I wanted to go deeper and learn what vegetation and connection to the natural world meant to her. In response, I offered my readings of her work. She listened to me explain how I read fissure as vaginal topographies, and she nodded in agreement as she considered what I had found in the work. Her openness toward my many perspectives struck me. I was used to some artists’ fight for their message to be received. Instead, she told me how she uses subtlety to engage with and work through the themes she wishes to acknowledge. She shared that she avoided guidance offered to her by established artists to take an evident stance or perspective in her work. To her, making a declarative statement or being overtly provocative would undo the layers of uncertainties residing in the paintings. Through our conversation, she described her process as “living in the question.” The question is a grey zone, which she navigates by feeling what comes to exist in her body. She notices how her feelings sit within her and how she sees the natural environment as an extension of her body: Like a skin, flora is vulnerable to outside forces but remains rooted to its place. Settled in the grey uncertainty of Chopra’s art is the feeling of rootedness as a metaphor for belonging. Like me, Chopra is a second-generation immigrant. To her, the expression of cultural identity conveys her desire for specificity, entangled with a struggle for belonging and an absence of it.
What I find in fissure is this boundary of belonging that is metaphorically spoken by the city. Cement grey. Sidewalk grey. Growing up in suburban and city streets, this drained-of-colour “colour” is so familiar. It is the infrastructure’s complexion. The pavement is an organizing tool designed for pedestrians to have a space to walk along the road; the curb is raised to protect us from fast-moving cars. Its anatomy is buried deep into the soil, with only some of it just poking out into the air. This ground tells us that we are safe from danger while we are entirely open to it. Within its protection, it tells us how to behave. In the city, you are guided by an abstract rule enforced by the pavement, the road, the street lights, and the signs. In following this rule, you are erased from the soil and become a city dweller. It is as though you can never touch the topsoil or sink into the earth’s greenery. Instead, you are told to “keep off the grass” or view manicured gardens from within the designated (public) green spaces. Eventually, the pavement cracks. The second skin breaks through. It’s dry and ashen, but it collects wind-blown seeds. Sometimes it’s stuffed with butts snuffed out by rubber souls. When it rains, the soil soaks up water. As the sun sets, it catches its warm rays. With time, with forgotten attention, something grows. It peeks out from restored earth. It beckons unwanted critters to nestle in its leaves. It thrives as a weed. Valueless or undervalued, it has a story of its own. The common Broadleaf Plantain sprouts from fissure’s crack. The weed is known for its round leaves and bud-filled stalks that grow relentlessly in urban areas. Its persistence is a reminder of its origin. Plantain came over to North America stuck onto the clothing and wares of European settlers. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Potawatomi botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer tells us that the Anishinaabe gave it the name White Man’s Footsteps, as it grew wherever they stepped foot. [2] But unlike other invasive species that came to the land, “[i]ts strategy was to be useful,” Kimmerer describes, “to fit into small places, to coexist with others around the dooryard, to heal wounds. Plantain is so prevalent, so well integrated, that we think of it as native.” [3]
Saanya Chopra, artist portrait. Courtesy of the artist.
Elsewhere. in/at/to/or from another place. [1] The absence of cultural markers in Chopra’s art is significant to how she navigates inviting the audience into the second generation’s diasporic experience: Our hereness and “the absence of our cultural belonging.” Born in the land our grand/parents migrated to, we are naturalized as citizens but feel like the other. Our skin, hair, and tongues signify our elsewhere and are the things we cling to, to remind us of our connections to lands previous generations migrated from and to traditions we carry with us. Despite our sense of being from elsewhere, we are also entirely of here: We are made from the building blocks of the West and steeped in its cultural colonization, assimilating to its self-described universality but remaining foreign within it, and pushing against it. This is sometimes where our uncertainty is made plain as settlers of colour. To experience Chopra’s work is not to be subject to a singular perspective, but instead to witness the spiralling struggle to describe our sense of belonging while untethered from our place of origin. To express this silent experience, Chopra circumnavigates the inexpressible feelings of hybrid identities by finding a visual language that speaks universally to a compassionate humanity.
Saanya Chopra, lingual/bilabial [shark teeth and canines], oil on canvas, each 5 x 5 inches, 2024.
What is lost during translation? What understandings shuttle back and forth as they are missed or overemphasized? These questions permeate Chopra’s series lingual/bilabial, or as I call it, teeth. Four teeth, two from a shark and two human canines, are painted in blue washes. Like a cyanotype, they appear caught in time and held up like an artifact to be studied. But to see them literally would misinterpret Chopra’s way of sharing a self-conception of cultural identity. I asked Chopra what made teeth an interesting subject to her. She responded that the teeth should make us think about the mouth and the “anatomy of sounds” that form a language. Words – signs with meanings – follow a system of codes that escape our lips and hang in our ears. On the other hand, as images, the visual language of teeth should be interpreted differently. In being symbolic, it speaks a multitude of languages. The teeth hold a collection of meanings, translatable and illegible to the audience. To Chopra, teeth hold power, a violent weapon, gnashing or verbally accosting, but at the same time, they are an armour used to protect and defend. She speaks about how language can give shape to our identity: The mouth is a conductor of being through language. It is the cavity that attempts to keep our language and undergoes the exhaustion of learning a new one. Learning another language is a remote feeling – the stretch of the lips, contraction of the mouth, the tap of tongue against teeth as your mouth becomes familiar with foreign sounds and longs to stay settled with its mother tongue. Yet, Chopra argues that discomfort is sometimes a “violence that had to be done [to belong].”
Saanya Chopra, say sorry list poem. Courtesy of the artist.
The poetics of vulnerability is what resides in Chopra’s artwork. As seen with fissure and lingual/bilabial, settled in the calmness of Chopra’s artwork is a tension that rises and remains unresolved. The interjection of multiple states coalescing is always present and toiling in her art, but it is also uttered in her writing. During my conversations with Chopra, we spoke about how her visual art and poems share common imagery. Words lead her artistic practice, “as poetry is painting, and painting can be used instead of words.” Images and imagery work together to appeal to the audience’s senses. Melded together, Chopra’s images and imagery offer lyrical depth to the art. Chopra’s poem “roots of roots” in Drain Mag’s The Garden Issue beautifully encapsulates her exploration of belonging, uncertainty, and home. Read alongside the artwork, the poem offers another entry point to experience a diasporic identity. What I find astonishing is the violence the speaker of the poem undergoes in the search for safety. At times, they are harmed by the critters that know no boundary between the speaker and the soil. At other moments, it is their own pruning that commands change. Ultimately, in the final stanza, it is the coo of the mother, who coaxes them into her earthly womb to rest is where we find peace. Although the context and meanings of her art remain opaquely covered by a dense canopy of leaves, there is always some semblance of connection that can be found within them.
Find more of Saanya’s work @saanyachopraart~
Guno Jones, “Migrant Art and the Politics of Language,” Words Matter, (Work in Progress I. International Museum of World Cultures, 2018), 59.
Robin Wall Kimmerer, “In the Footsteps of Nanabozho: Becoming Indigenous to Place,” Braiding Sweetgrass, (Milkweed Editions, 2013), 213.
Robin Wall Kimmerer, “In the Footsteps of Nanabozho: Becoming Indigenous to Place,” Braiding Sweetgrass, (Milkweed Editions, 2013), 214.
