Ayusha Ariana

Architecture and Environmental Studies major

My work is entirely driven by my curiosity about how visual media can help me both demonstrate ideas I am already passionate about, and understand those ideas through the process of creating art. I have a deep passion for working at the intersection of climate resilience and health equity, and I have been introduced to art and architecture relatively recently. I found design and visual works to be a powerful way to reach people and translate ideas with nuances that words simply cannot. As I build my vocabulary and my skills in such visual languages, I find myself inspired by the labor and meticulousness that is necessary to recreate work that I consider both meaningful and beautiful. It is a challenge that I am rising to meet because of the joyful clarity that artistic work brings to my own thought processes, even as it impacts and is shaped by how others react to it. I am striving to move forward and make the medium the message, and I look forward to growing even more!

Resilience is not so different.

oil and acrylic on canvas and wood; mixed media

Jewett Sculpture Court

large colorful multi-layer painting on a tiled floor; although partly abstract, elements resembling water, trees, and buildings are discernable

Using Dhaka, Bangladesh as a starting off point, this work pieces together a vision of how cities might be able to tackle climate change, to help paint hope back into a discourse that is so heavy with despair and inevitability. Through adaptive strategies such as vegetation and hard infrastructure along riverbanks to protect against flooding, mitigative strategies such as direct air capture scrubbers lining the road to store carbon, and community building strategies such as an interconnected garden-roof complex to allow for socialization and green recreation in a city fighting overcrowding, the painting endeavors to display different ways cities might successfully live with the climate changes that we have already experienced, while actively working to mitigate the worst. In the process, the piece interrogates how an architectural drawing, such as a "plan," or an "elevation" or "section," can be translated to a painting, and how that can reveal and demonstrate information about the built environment in different ways.

detail shot of 3D painting with greenery, buildings, and raised blocks painted to look like skyscrapers

detail shot of multi-level painting showing schematic-like elements as well as vegetation painted on all sides of the stacked canvases

top down view of multi-level colorful painting with schematic elements and elements resembling water, vegetation, buildings; some blocks painted like buildings emerge from the surface; some areas are cut away to show layers beneath

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