Maya Grace Misra

Maya Grace Misra utilizes photography, miniature painting, and video installation to investigate repressed historical narratives. Stemming from a lifelong obsession with flags, she has found that these symbols are most often a representation of the institutional framework surrounding a particular place—a design created by people in power that serves to assert or brand the idea of a place, its people, and its culture. Acting as a gross conflation of groups, flags often reduce a diverse set of values, racial backgrounds, and interpersonal experiences to a single visual form consistent with colonial control. Even when flags are not explicitly present in her artwork, they have guided Misra in considering the ways in which images serve to reaffirm dominant historical narratives, while erasing other lived realities. In her most recent project, America’s Harvest Box, Misra uses photography, text, and video installation work to reveal the effects of United States military occupation on food practices around the world. One of the primary manifestations of this project, a series of cooking videos, situates the kitchen space within various sites around San Diego as a means of tracing a global footprint of U.S. imperialism, while at the same time tying institutional violence to the individual through questions of consumption, trauma, and consent.