ART FACTS: Connecting and disconnecting

Nazia Ejaz's bold coloured paintings with cultural patterns and shapes that relate an individual to its surrounding captured the viewer's attention in a solo exhibition at Canvas Gallery, Karachi. Titled "The Green Room" the show presented a world created by the artist with respect to her connection and separation with her homeland and roots as she has been living in Australia for over twelve years.
A graduate from the National College of Arts, Lahore (NCA) her career spans over the past two decades. She received her first Masters Degree from The Slade School of Art, and a second Masters Degree from the University of South Australia.
Being a daughter of melody queen Noor Jehan, Nazia's works reflected her mother's creative influence. Through her work she explored various themes of perception and identity. She wanted to know how an individual perceives and relates to the social environment.
She used geometric patterns in her paintings particularly circles, squares and hexagons. It seemed as if she was trying to understand and make others understand the connection and separation of a person with its surrounding called society which is bound with traditional norms called culture. Most of the designs and patterns were derived from our cultural heritage and her cross-cultural life experiences.
She used screens in her recent work other than geometric pattern. Screens and patterns recur in her works as she used them to refer to how socially constructed spaces of separation operate as makers of identity. "Within the Indo/Islamic architecture tradition, screens are used for separation, for demarcating a space, to form boundaries, to shroud and reveal, depending on the perspective of the viewer. The architectural device keeps out and keeps in, and in the process of ordering the environment produces something else," she explained.
"Similarly, the motif of the grid operates as a screen that filters and constructs and constrains. They are metaphors for points of separation within a space. The patterns within the work speak to notions of cultural difference and similarity, to constructions of gender and identity, in front of, behind, and within a problematic screen." She repeated patterns and designs, forms and colours to give a meditative feel to her works.
Thus she tried to gain deeper knowledge of the subject. From the use of grill patterns to several screens to missing pieces of glass, her paintings are also a reference to traditions. The colours and shapes appearing again and again thus creating an aura of mystique and charm the viewers in a unique way. The viewers became engaged with her works as they see connection of their lives with the painting's mystery. Hence they began feeling the same experiences as the painting painted. "My work is about binaries that permeate multiple levels of social perceptions and interactions turning them into mediated experiences," Nazia said.
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