"Icon" Collage

Parveen is a self taught multi disciplinary artist who lives and works in a suburb of Toronto, Canada. Mixed media collages, abstract encaustic paintings and photography are her current media and allow her to become a conduit for a greater universal force that connects all living beings. She is very keen and very passionate about the concept of “Ik” which means one or oneness, that every ‘thing’ on earth and the nether regions are part of the one and the same thing. It’s not the shallow concept of one, but the one which goes deeper, which unifies all living things, which identifies their source as one. Before the world, there was the only one living entity. People call this entity many different things, god, Yahweh, allah etc. This entity is one but it looks like many different things, which is what Parveen conveys in her artist practice. She not only imbibes the divine but seeks to capture the diversity in creation, representation of bodies previously absent or excluded. Regardless of the media she uses to create, her work is historical and focused on the lapse of time. Her portraits are created in layers, often with worn out denim, while the abstract work with wax is incised and scraped back to layers underneath. Working much like an archeologist, excavating, removing, scratching to reveal the treasures hidden below.