Connection is Never Lost

            Art works are not known for the use of only one medium, now a days artists are during further explorations within multiple mediums. Amna Asghar is among this group of artists that use computers and different hand mediums to create her pieces. Before she had started exploring this avenue, during her undergrad years she studied traditional art in academia. However, her graduate schooling had opened her eyes to more medium such as screen-printing. Through the various mediums Amna is able to portray her connection to her ethnicity and race. 

            Screen-printing wasn’t the only medium that Amna explored, air brushing was another along with collaging her paintings, screen-prints and airbrushed pieces together to form a single artwork. Her process starts with connecting to her identity, her connection to her parents and everyone from India through looking at the artworks and films via YouTube. There are also grocery stores with their images of fruits and various types of food that she can imagine as a piece of artwork. It’s quite interesting the beginning of her process, where she looks at the simple everyday objects and scenes in everyone’s life. I have always thought of that idea but had changed my mind to a more exciting scenery with sports. However, the end results of her pieces portray a different perspective of the fruits and Bollywood scenes, one with emotion and a deeper meaning. 

            Through the Bollywood images and grocery stores that are within the community she is able to connect deeper to her roots. Within her pieces she is able to communicate, express everything that she can’t put into words. The relationship between where she is, where she was born to where her family, her parents originated from are even said within her pieces. The color, the composition, the arrangement, the idea all help her portray what words cannot. Words have been said to only do so much like in quotes, “actions speak louder than words”. For Amna Asghar, her art is the action, the connection between her birth place to her parents, her ethnicity, where she came from, where the story for her originates. 

            Through her usage of mediums she is able to portray a connection between airbrush, paint, and screen printing in addition to the symbolic colors. For each of the pieces, Amna selects the colors based on the emotional meaning, what the color signifies such as red is angry when looked at through a normal perspective. However, with her pieces red does not always give the meaning of angry, but continue to signify what she can’t explain. I never thought of using colors to symbolize words more than emotions, the story behind her, her identities that she cannot put into words. To symbolize a story through the usage of colors takes art into a new direction with various mediums. Her words, the artwork tell a story of connection between her identities. Instead of choosing only one part of her identity she intertwines all of her identities into one. None are left behind, ignored, or prioritized over another enforcing that, for her the connection is never lost.