Hannah Traore Gallery is pleased to present Topographies, a solo exhibition of new work by Misha Japanwala at EXPO Chicago. In this series, Japanwala documents and celebrates bodies with natural rolls, lumps, and fat—creating casts of the human form that encourage us to collectively identify and release shame. Honoring each fold, she reimagines the body as a landscape: a dynamic and shifting natural formation.
This series began with an open call, an invitation for individuals to visit Japanwala’s home and have their bodies cast—offering space and acceptance for their curves, scars, and stretch marks. Her respondents were a group of women and non-binary people who are South and South East Asian, ranging from age twenty to fifty. She approached each muse without any predetermined intentions, beginning each session with a conversation about each individual’s relationship with their unique form, the stories and experiences embedded in their scars, and their meditations on particular sites of shame. Welcoming her sitters to take a relaxed posture, she then created several molds of the same body, applying silicone to her sitter’s skin, coating the silicone with a plaster shell, removing the mold to reveal a convex cast, then painting the mold with thin layers of tinted resin—which when demolded, reveals a complete sculpture. Made in direct communication with authentic bodies, these self-topographies occupy the same space as their physical forms do in life, but in Japanwala’s hands, are released from the toxic ideals established by dominant culture.
Sculpted with smooth edges and in bright colors—brilliant shades of blue, lavender, ochre, and red—these casts offer a vision of a body that is joyful, leisurely, and playful, refusing to be concealed by slimming shades, insisting that they are enough exactly as they are. Shifting their orientation, Japanwala abstracts these figures without augmenting them, beholding each body as if it was a majestic stretch of earth.
Each sculpture in this body of work is named after a geological formation; while different types of bodies are often described in terms that criticize and scrutinize, various types of land are neutral in their difference, instead, often praising the great diversity of the earth—be it rugged rock, rolling hills, or rippling tides. In thinking of land and body as one, we are reminded of the power of language to reframe and heal, rather than distort and shame, our collective perceptions of beauty. This series confronts the self consciousness imposed by cultures around the world, and refuses to tokenize bodies that exist outside of exclusionary and phobic standards. Like the land, bodies must be free. She aspires to recognize the intimate interactions of fat flesh, muscle, and scar tissue, to communicate with more accepting language, to physically represent networks of care, and to empower shamelessness equally in personal interactions and public platforms; one molding at a time, she insists that all our bodies need to do is exist.
Hannah Traore Gallery is pleased to present Topographies, a solo exhibition of new work by Misha Japanwala at EXPO Chicago. In this series, Japanwala documents and celebrates bodies with natural rolls, lumps, and fat—creating casts of the human form that encourage us to collectively identify and release shame. Honoring each fold, she reimagines the body as a landscape: a dynamic and shifting natural formation.
This series began with an open call, an invitation for individuals to visit Japanwala’s home and have their bodies cast—offering space and acceptance for their curves, scars, and stretch marks. Her respondents were a group of women and non-binary people who are South and South East Asian, ranging from age twenty to fifty. She approached each muse without any predetermined intentions, beginning each session with a conversation about each individual’s relationship with their unique form, the stories and experiences embedded in their scars, and their meditations on particular sites of shame. Welcoming her sitters to take a relaxed posture, she then created several molds of the same body, applying silicone to her sitter’s skin, coating the silicone with a plaster shell, removing the mold to reveal a convex cast, then painting the mold with thin layers of tinted resin—which when demolded, reveals a complete sculpture. Made in direct communication with authentic bodies, these self-topographies occupy the same space as their physical forms do in life, but in Japanwala’s hands, are released from the toxic ideals established by dominant culture.
Sculpted with smooth edges and in bright colors—brilliant shades of blue, lavender, ochre, and red—these casts offer a vision of a body that is joyful, leisurely, and playful, refusing to be concealed by slimming shades, insisting that they are enough exactly as they are. Shifting their orientation, Japanwala abstracts these figures without augmenting them, beholding each body as if it was a majestic stretch of earth.
Each sculpture in this body of work is named after a geological formation; while different types of bodies are often described in terms that criticize and scrutinize, various types of land are neutral in their difference, instead, often praising the great diversity of the earth—be it rugged rock, rolling hills, or rippling tides. In thinking of land and body as one, we are reminded of the power of language to reframe and heal, rather than distort and shame, our collective perceptions of beauty. This series confronts the self consciousness imposed by cultures around the world, and refuses to tokenize bodies that exist outside of exclusionary and phobic standards. Like the land, bodies must be free. She aspires to recognize the intimate interactions of fat flesh, muscle, and scar tissue, to communicate with more accepting language, to physically represent networks of care, and to empower shamelessness equally in personal interactions and public platforms; one molding at a time, she insists that all our bodies need to do is exist.
