About


Siri Khandavilli is an intermedia artist working in the realms of video art, paintings and installations.

Siri Khandavilli’s videos have a painterly and poetic quality. Some times “performances for the camera” form the raw footage of her works.
The unconventional use of intense colors, space, scale and strange juxtapositionings combine to create a mesmerizing effect. The imagery is strange, sensual and at times ambiguous.

Like her videos, her paintings are also vivid in color. There is the abandon and joy of painting as well as the restraint in drawings. The minute drawings in her paintings depict everyday objects, people and mundane sceneries as microscopic objects. In these drawings we can see the influences of the places around her and situations that she encounters. The flattened 2 D quality of her works speak of a clear influence from Indian traditional painting and a love for tribal arts.

The overall effect of her works is a feeling of the material world beginning to merge into the metaphysical. There is a relationship between the extremes - incompatible and yet inseparable. As the artist explains “My definitions, desires, politics, opinions and issues are literally painted against the backdrop of the Big Picture.” In this manner her works become very personal, poetic and at the same time sociopolitical.

Conceptually there is duality and unity, contradictions and agreements.

Siri Khandavilli was born in Mysore, India. She grew up in Bangalore near Shankarmutt, a Hindu temple and Vedic school.
Her father, N. Lakshminarayan, was a renowned Kannada film director. She trained in Mysore traditional painting and went onto study 3 years of BFA (painting) at Chitrakala Parishath, Bangalore. She later migrated to the US and studied new media arts, video & 3D modeling at Arizona State University.

Siri Khandavilli’s works have been exhibited at short film festivals in ASU, Harrywood Gallery, Modified Art Gallery, SIGGRAPH, and Art Junction.
Her works are in private collections in USA, UK, India and Italy.

Currently the artist stays, commutes and creates between India and USA.