Siri Devi Khandavilli works across painting, performance, video, and installation to create visual art rooted in traditional Indian techniques and yet transcends cultural specificity to hint at more significant commentaries about the nature of the present. She employs various methods, processes, and diverse approaches by co-opting the language of sculpture to painting, printmaking to sculpture, and so forth.
She wants her Art to be timeless yet visual articulations of contemporary experience.
She is interested in global cultural migrations, the perception and history of the femme body in art, and how tradition transmutes across time and place. In her creative pursuits, she seeks to engage with an expansive range of influences, encompassing politics, literature, cinema, mythologies, and music. She is not confined to any particular medium, finding freedom in expressing her ideas through various channels as she sees fit.
She believes her artworks and art processes are dynamic forces capable of evolving and acquiring new energy, like a mirror that can reflect different angles and appearances.
A leitmotif she employs in her works is Rorschach-like Inkblots forms and mirrors, both as a medium as well as an idea.
She believes that both her inkblots and mirrors allow viewers to explore and discover themselves. She hopes that her Art is a creative entity with flexibility, adaptability, and the ability to exist, witness, and be a part of its surroundings and transcend time and place.
Khandavilli hails from a family of accomplished artists, with her father being the renowned Kannada film director N. Lakshminarayan. She began attending art classes at the age of three at Karnataka Chitrakala Parishath. She studied Mysore traditional painting under the tutelage of her aunt Susheela Devi. She has a BFA and an MFA in Intermedia from Arizona State University, A second MFA in Sculpture from Karnataka Chitrakala Parishath and has trained under the temple sculptor, Pandiyan from Kumbakonam. She works in person at various ateliers for her metal works. Her extensive and broad education has shaped her into a visual artist at ease with various media and forms of artistic expression.
She has had numerous solo and group shows and has been collected around the world, including Albertina Museum (2020), Durham University, UK (2018), Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, USA (2016), Fidelity art collection (2016, 2014), ASU Art Museum, USA (2015), Queens Museum, USA (2014), ESSL Museum, Austria and Indigo Blue Art Gallery, Singapore (both in 2010) as well as art fairs, such as Art Basel, Miami (2013, 2014, 2015). India Art Fair (2020)
The artist divides her time between New York and New Delhi.