Vijay Masharani

Vijay Masharani is an artist based in Queens, New York. He was born in 1995 in Bay Area, CA, and graduated with a BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2017. Notable among his two-person exhibitions are Triage, held at Clima, Milan (2021), #38: Gas, Honey with Raza Kazmi at Museum Gallery, New York (2019), and It Might Be Warm But It’s Not Clean with Trisha Cheeney at High-Tide, Philadelphia (2017).

His works have been featured in various group exhibitions, including K as in Knight at Helena Anrather, New York (2021), FREE FALL at Shoot the Lobster LA (2021), Still Life at Drawer NYC (2020), Bangalore Flat at Home Sweet Home, Bangalore (2019), U:L:O at Interstate Projects, Brooklyn (2019), Pig Latin In Quicksand at Clima, Milan (2019), SUPERHOST at PANE PROJECT/Like a Little Disaster, Polignano A Mare (2019), and Pure Raw at RESORT, Baltimore (2018), among others.

Vijay Masharani is a Queens-based artist who delves into the themes of state violence anticipation and white supremacy's encoding in digital media through his artwork. His recent video, 'Mourning in Advance for the future real death of my imaginary brother', was showcased in the joint exhibition #38: Gas, Honey at the Museum Gallery in New York. The video utilizes familiar iconography to create a disorienting visual landscape.

Masharani's works scrutinize expressions of power and showcase authority as an index of larger structures behind fraught images and gestures. In his 2017 exhibition, 'It Might Be Warm But It’s Not Clean with Trisha Cheeney', the artist explored masculinist fragility using a widely circulated shooter's manifesto as inspiration. Together, they created 'FEELME', a piece that examined disempowerment by depicting a figure who reenacts the conditions of his victimhood in endless, looping psychodramas.