ABOUT ME
My name is Jahnavi Zondervan. I am a student at Columbia University in New York, originally from Cambridge, Massachusetts. I’ve been passionate about making art for as long as I can remember. Making art helps me express my identity, my values, and my understanding of the world that we all live in. I also make art to process my emotions and manage my mental health; my art is a space where I can portray myself metaphorically, and bring my emotional imagination visually to life.
Photographs by Sam Williams, Nine Acre Photography
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As a high school and college student, I really struggled with my identity in America, to find a social place to call my own. Some of my first paintings were explorations of my racial identity and the connections between my ancestral origins. My father is from Suriname, a former Dutch colony in South America, and my ancestry through him includes African, European, Native Caribbean and Jewish lineages. My mother is from Punjab in India, and my ancestry through her includes Persian, Kashmiri, Punjabi. I’ve been blessed with the opportunity to explore my origins through visiting these places. They are full of fascinating people, vibrant colors, incredible wildlife, and a feeling of belonging I found nowhere else. This gave me many cultures and ideas to choose from, and sometimes that was a blessing– I got to make my own way and didn’t feel overly pressured by stereotypes– but other times I just wanted to belong somewhere naturally, but couldn’t choose any one place and no one place would choose me.
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Exploring these concepts in my art, I used motifs like multiple arms, or Indian landscapes and jewelry in an unusual setting to represent this tension between wanting to belong to a specific ethnic group, and the dawning reality that I belong only to myself. I featured both black and Indian faces in my portraiture, but eventually found myself gravitating toward self-portraits, always wanting most to explore the elements of the connections between my ancestral origins that created me.
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During the pandemic, I took a semester off from college, due to Carpal Tunnel Syndrome. During that time, while my wrists healed, I was forced to explore new approaches to making art. This gave me time and space to focus, and I began to wonder: what do I really want to say? What do I want people to see in my paintings, my drawings? Suddenly, my identities in social settings faded; I was often alone. I had to come to terms with who I was when no one was there to label me. Who was I when no one was around, and what did that mean for my art? I found that rather than just create accurate portraits, I wanted people to viscerally feel how I was experiencing the world and the pandemic. I found metaphors for how I was feeling; the way my problems felt like bubbles, like they could burst at any moment, or how desperately I wanted to see India again. I experimented with water colors and began to work smaller, so I could finish and begin new ideas more quickly. Those became pieces that held a meaning I was unable to describe with words.
And isn't that the true goal of art?
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