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Virtual Mirrors Artist Spotlight Talk
Sunday, October 10, 2021, 5:00 PM - 6:00 PM PDT
Category: Committee Event

LACPA'S Arts, Creativity, and Culture Committee is proud to sponsor a series of Artist Spotlights where we invite artists from our community of artists from Mirrors of The Mind 9 to give hour-long talks about their artistic process and their unique position as artists practicing in the field of mental health. Co-chaired by Dr. Pamela McCrory and Dr. Terry Marks-Tarlow.

On October 10th, from 5-6 PM Pacific Time

Dr. Nisha Gupta will present

DESI EROS

Reclaiming South Asian Erotic Power through Surrealist Folk Art 

 

DESI EROS is an arts-based phenomenological research study about South Asian (Desi) women’s experiences of reclaiming erotic power, in the contexts of our sociopolitical contexts and ancestral histories. I collected six Desi women’s descriptions of reclaiming erotic power, interpreted their descriptions for thematic meanings, and then expressed these meanings as surrealist folk art in the style of Frida Kahlo, with cultural symbols imbedded in each painting. In addition to showcasing the artwork produced by this process, this presentation will recount my South Asian American psyche's experience of decolonization and critical consciousness while creating the artwork, as the symbolic images in each painting emerged by a transpersonal process of being intuitively led by Divine Imagination, which awakened deeper understandings of indigenous, pre-colonial South Asian cultures that I did not know before. The final artistic and scholarly research findings can be viewed at www.desieros.com, which aim to liberate the meanings of reclaiming erotic power for Desi women–both personally, as described by each writer’s subjective experience, and collectively, as expressed by our indigenous cultural symbols as Desi people. The findings suggest that in the process of reclaiming erotic power, Desi women also reclaim voice, autonomy, faith, desire, wisdom and love across our intersectional (queer and religious) identities.

 

Dr. Nisha Gupta is an assistant professor of psychology at the University of West Georgia. Alongside her training as a psychotherapist, she integrates phenomenological research, liberation psychology, and the arts to create therapeutic interventions for personal and sociocultural healing. Her projects as a researcher, artist, and educator seek to disrupt cultures of silence, evoke empathy and compassion, initiate dialogue, and build solidarity across difference. She is the founder of the Phenomenological Art Collective, an arts-based research lab at UWG that uses phenomenological research to produce evocative artwork that illuminates lived experience for the purposes of psychoeducation, sociocultural healing, and social advocacy. At UWG, Gupta teaches liberation psychology, creativity, and arts-based phenomenological research to students. She is based in Atlanta, GA.

 

RSVP for this event by emailing [email protected]*

*Please indicate in your RSVP if your Zoom name differs from your RSVP name.

Virtual access will be sent prior to the event.

 


Contact: Dr. Nisha Gupta [email protected]