Natessa Amin – Feed the Moon

COMMONWEAL is pleased to announce its first exhibition of 2024: Natessa Amin’s Feed the Moon, featuring over a dozen new paintings and works on paper that emphasize regenerative processes and cycles of healing.

Feed the Moon addresses themes including memory, mysticism, ritual, and place through the lens of Amin’s transcultural identity — as a child of the Indian diaspora and her upbringing in Pennsylvania. Throughout her works she implements an ever-growing lexicon of evocative symbols alluding to notions of creation and destruction.

The act of “feeding the moon” is a metaphor coined by mystic philosopher G.I. Gurdjieff for self-revelation and consciousness raising, contending with and navigating personal trauma in order to find a place of equilibrium within ourselves and with others.

Having grown up with two parents in the medical field, an awareness of the changes our bodies undergo were always present in Amin’s life and in her works, Amin employs techniques similar to those used by medical professionals, such as masking, scraping, cauterizing and sculpting layers of paint. Like scar tissue, her paintings emphasize transition and growth that heal over remnants and residues of the past.