Her work suggests a kind of psychology of geography – an unfixed landscape that you alter by your very presence. Is experiencing someone’s memory of a place the same as physically being there? Which is more real? She is interested in the way the absence of a place becomes a presence, and suggesting what this may look like in the multiverse. At a time of global uncertainty, a flood of heartache: she fabricates a phenomenological world, constantly in flux. The work urges you to surrender your senses to the unknowable, build an intimacy with distant places, and develop a tangible relationship with the photograph.
Most recently, illesha Khandelwal had a solo show in New York City at the Flux Factory gallery in Long Island City. Her handmade artist books have been exhibited from the Burren College of Art in Ireland, to the first Boston Art Book Fair and Odds and Ends: Yale Art Book Fair. Her photographic series on silk organza, “12 Days of Dreaming” was showcased at
The Salon – an exhibition highlighting a dynamic range of contemporary female artists, in partnership with The Peabody Essex Museum and hosted at Sweet Rickey, a female-helmed film production studio in Boston. Her work has been continually exhibited at several galleries at her alma mater, MassArt, where she has had a solo show and participated in various group shows. She was included in the annual MassArt Auction ‘17, and curated the Annual Photography All School Show ‘17.
