This looks like a beautifully painted room, or one with wildly detailed wallpaper, but it’s so much better than that. Much, much better.
This is the work of artist Anila Quayyum Agha, an assistant professor of Drawing at the Herron School of Art and Design in Indianapolis, IN. Anila is a world renowned artist who likes to work with mixed media to create artwork that explores global politics, cultural multiplicity, mass media and social and gender roles.
This project entitled “Intersections” is a large-scale installation composed of patterned wood. The cube is 6.5′ and, with a light source inside the cube, beautiful shadow patterns are created on the surrounding white walls.
She says the project is meant to “uncover the contradictory nature of all intersections; which are simultaneously boundaries but also points of meeting”. The wooden frieze emulates a pattern from the Alhambra in Spain. “Intersections” was been selected as a finalist for the 3rd Annual See.Me: Year in Review Competition.
Anila shared with Reshareworthy.com the following photos, which were captured during the creation of her installation. These are just incredible.
Here is one of the six sides of the cube.
The cube in its raw form.
A little spray paint…
Installing the piece.
Here’s a close up of some of the patterns on the cube.
With a little bit of help and after a lot of hard work…
Pure brilliance!
In her art statement, Anila writes:
“In the city of Lahore, where I grew up, the mosque was not only a place of worship, but also the repository of the public art form. Thousands of mosques were spread all over the city, filled with bouquets of calligraphic writing and geometric symmetry that embrace pilgrims five times a day. But like the millions of women in Lahore, there was no space for me in any of these mosques, the dictates of culture relegating us all to praying at home.”
“It is this seminal experience of being excluded from a space of community and creativity that resonated with me when I recently visited Moorish Spain. There I experienced the historic site of the Alhambra. And to my amazement discovered the complex expressions of both wonder and exclusion that have been my experience while growing up in Pakistan.”
“The Alhambra palace was built in the thirteenth century for the last Muslin emirs in Spain. The poets named this location, ‘a pearl set in emeralds’.”
“My installation emulates patterns from the Alhambra, which was poised at the intersection of history, culture and art and was a place where Islamic and Western discourses, met and co-existed in harmony and served as a testament to the symbiosis of difference.”
You can see more of Anila’s creative work on here website here: http://anilaagha.squarespace.com/
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