I am an artist of South Asian descent – raised in Pakistan by an American mother and a Pakistani father. For the last fourteen years I have been living and working in the U.S.A drawing from both cultures and creating my own unique identity as an individual and as an artist.

In the 1950's my Norwegian grandmother learned to forget her native tongue, and lost touch with her family in her country assimilating into the melting pot of America. Two generations later, here I am retaining parts of my culture, language, nationalism and reinventing what is means to be an American in the year 2005. As the face of America changes so does the meaning of word “multicultural”. Using the medium of collage, photography and video, I explore the complex, fragmented and multiple meanings of “globalization” and “multiculturalism” and their significance in American culture today. My art seeks to interpret issues of race, cultural identity and religion through working across media, in between the spaces of art and culture, painting and digital media.

In my work I use the iconographic image of the American flag to take on multiple roles. In some places the flag becomes a symbol representing mass cultural identity yet at other times it becomes a part of my individual self. I ask the viewer, to examine who are they really looking at. Can we define and categorize someone according to gender, culture, politics or religion?

The bold color, scale, directness, and naiveté of the mixed media collages reference poster art and the duratrans light boxes allude to the world of advertising and mass media. The work has an immediacy and directness that reaches out to the viewer.

Nehru writes in his autobiography: “I am a quaint blend of the east and the west. At ease everywhere, at home nowhere.” Yet, unlike him, I feel comfortably at home, gliding in and out of both worlds, adopting for myself the best aspects of my collective traditions, customs, and way of life. My paintings and my professional career seek to synthesize these cross-cultural and multi-dimensional worldviews reaching out to a larger audience touching their human sensibilities with a universally shared experience.

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