NEW YORK, NY.- Uprise Art is opening Over Order, an exhibition of new work by Sarah Ingraham and Padma Rajendran. Akin to the excess of over ordering at a meal, Ingraham’s paintings celebrate lush abundance in an intoxicating deluge. Her works contain a freedom from fastidious arrangement, with bounty overflowing the confines of each vessel. In Rajendran’s paintings, reverence for the home, and homage to the experience of building and tending to one, supplants ordered structures. In these works, Rajendran echews the conventions of the rectilinear canvas, and neatly repeating patterns.

Ingraham’s paintings are ideated intuitively, without preliminary drawing. She starts on a vibrantly colored ground and freehand renders florals, abundant piles of citrus and stonefruit, dizzyingly patterned tableware, and resplendent vessels. Inspired by a recent trip to Portugal, Ingraham includes tile and decorative borders in these paintings, filling the work with even more pattern and color. This homage to azulejo tilework is one of the many nods to ornamentation and decorative arts throughout art history that have influenced Ingraham’s practice. The extravagance of her tableaus are further underscored by her vivid palette, which combines complementary colors, giving a vibrational quality to the objects being depicted.

Reminiscent of global folk art traditions, Rajendran’s paintings address her own observations and contradictory feelings towards home, homecoming, and homeland. Using resist and dye, Rajendran creates painterly drawings on shaped and sewn silk, encoding the cloth with adornment, symbols, and scenes that reflect on immigrant storytelling, womanhood, and the concept of home as a tended space. Unfolding in vivid tones of magenta, indigo, and burnt orange, Rajendran’s work engages with the symbolism of fruitfulness as it relates to the female body, and personal translations of shrines and monuments. Rajendran uses the ubiquity of textiles as a tool to communicate identity, place, and personal narrative.

While Rajendran’s library of symbols that represent time, memory, and the body, speaks to the chaotic discord of daily life, Ingraham’s paintings similarly encapsulate the unpredictability of growth and progress. In both Ingraham and Rajendran’s works, the artists use pattern and color as strings tying the traditions of artists and artisans in the past, to our current complex cultures. The tableaus and textiles present ideas of prosperity, permanence, and other innately human musings through a lens that expands and contracts between the universal and personal.

Sarah Ingraham

Raised on the coast of Maine, Sarah Ingraham (b. 1994) is a Brooklyn, New York-based painter whose practice spans painting, murals, rug making and wallpaper design. Strongly influenced by her background in art history and reverence for decorative traditions in craft, she looks to ceramics and textiles from all over the world as inspiration in her work, which combines ancient motifs with a fresh palette. Sarah’s paintings draw upon the long lineage of still-life and landscape painting, recasting these genres in a contemporary light to explore themes of overindulgence, pleasure, and vitality.

Padma Rajendran

Padma Rajendran (b. 1985) is an artist based in Catskill, New York. Primarily working in a textile-based practice, Padma paints dye and resist onto silk in order to craft representational paintings that reflect on immigrant storytelling, womanhood, and the concept of home as a tended space. Padma’s work contains forms that are personal translations of shrines and monuments, these forms evoking a greater symbolic narrative that hold universal resonance.

Uprise Art
Over Order: Sarah Ingraham & Padma Rajendran
August 9th, 2023 - October 20th, 2023