The Unknowns, 2009

Series of mixed media works on canvas layering commercial printing processes with painting and collage. Materials intended to produce large-scale digital images that dominate today’s visual landscape, the image quality of these works evokes contemporary subway advertising and Bollywood posters.

The Unknowns explores the relationship between anonymity, mass-mediated images, and the monumental, in the construction of a feminine iconography. Ganesh collages and appropriates materials from divergent sources, including 1960s-70s B-grade movies, 19th century orientalist painting, documentary photography of sex workers and mid-century studio photography in India. Sculptural elements, extracted from objects of daily life (shower curtains, fake hair, automotive glass, etc), suggest an entangling of the mythic feminine and everyday material culture.