Sanjay Vora

Life
I was inspired at an early age to be creative. Born in New Jersey into a musical Indian family, I began playing instruments around the house, learning by ear and watching my parents perform at concerts. My urge to compose music early in life paralleled my desire to create visual environments. Producing drawings and paintings was a way to manifest and inhabit my visions to which music had played as an ongoing soundtrack. Both my music and art have been strongly influenced by my bicultural upbringing as well as the surrounding rural American landscapes of my childhood. In addition to an undergraduate degree in Architecture from the University of Virginia in 2002, I obtained an MFA in Painting at the San Francisco Art Institute in 2005. In the last 11 years, in addition to my painting practice, I have taught visual arts at a Middle School, two semesters of painting at UC Berkeley, and had 3 children of my own. My works have been exhibited throughout the United States and are in collections all over the world. I currently live, teach and practice in Oakland, California.

Artist Statement
Born of reflection, my pieces become visual experiences, coming to terms with the command and inevitability of time. Brought up in a suburban American home seeped in East Indian heritage and repetitive modal music, I now attempt to resolve my own sense of meaning and truth, endlessly searching to remember and rediscover that which was once familiar.

My current bodies of work examine the fragility of the actual; the processing of our place in the now. The acknowledgement of time haunts, holds, and cuts through each painting as a structure and order, a system in place which continuously tests my eventual acceptance. Painted experiences and materials of association become connections as they intersect, live and pass through interstitial, transitional moments towards adulthood and endings–lost, found, dissected, excavated and/or reconstructed into sensations driven by comfort.

Sanjay Vora is represented by Lonnie Lee, Vessel Gallery.