Hey, I’m ananta.
Born in Manhattan. I grew between South Jamaica, Queens and an ashram in Brooklyn, while attending a predominantly Jewish primary school in Flushing.
Streets. Synagogues. Sanskrit. Subway.
With all the seeming contradiction, I found curriculum.
From an early age, Vedic philosophy became a compass.
Not just some belief system adopted from the outside, but a way of seeing that felt conclusive and revealing.
At Art and Design High School in New York City, inner ideals found their way into form.
Pencils, paint, lenses, and words. The disciplines were always different but the source was always the same. A search for truth.
I am now a multidisciplinary artist, writer, and kirtaniya. But more than any title, I want to bridge the spiritual (not necessarily religious) and the material.
*Here is the part of the letter where I pretentiously refer to myself in the 3rd person…
ananta.'s work is not made to be observed from a distance. It is made to be felt.
Asking to open up to something deeply in and about yourself.
To convince you that your life is an ongoing masterpiece.
Welcome to the Museum of me.
x . .
UNE FEMME (photographic series)
une femme is a practice of seeing.
The women in these photographs are not performing for the lens. They are simply present. In their beauty.
In complexity.
In the quiet authority of their own existence.
Rooted in a Vedic understanding of the divine feminine, une femme asks a simple question. What does it mean to truly see a woman? Not as the world has decided she should look, but as she actually is. In the unguarded moment. In the full inhabitation of her own life.
These photographs are love letters to presence. To the light that arrives exactly once. To the women who trusted the silence between artist and subject long enough to let something real emerge.