Priyankka Krishnan is an illustrator, concept artist, and bubble tea enthusiast with a budding interest in storyboarding for animation. Her work centers around the ethereal, images of that which should not exist – and do not exist – but have an edge of reality to them. Her work tries to depict the cute, the fantastic, the horrific, and everything in between through digital paintings, using brush strokes that are just clear enough to understand the subject material (a sunset, a mountain range, a person) but vague enough to ask the viewer to question what they’re seeing. What does that sunset mean? That is up to viewers. Krishnan hopes to inject a sense of dissociation in her audience, and that is indeed what her BFA exhibition is about. Here, she assembles three paintings – two adjacent 8″ x 16″ paintings, depicting atmospheric backgrounds and figures, that almost point down to a third 16″ x 14″ painting that rests below them. This center painting exhibits a figure covering their face, their expression caught between distressed and lost. Behind that painting rests several storyboards from 2020, scattered about in no particular order. The piece is meant to represent a tension between work that displays a world in fiction, and the world itself as feeling like fiction. The act of artmaking during a traumatic world event seems discordant with reality, and that distance between action and existence is what she aims to portray in her artwork.
