Katyayani Singh (1998, Indian)
I’m Sleeping, 2018
Progressive Video
Gift of Charlotte and Alan Artus
I’m Sleeping speaks volumes in this moment and couldn’t be a better piece to investigate right now!
Katyayani (Kat) Singh is a graphic designer and art director. She grew up in India, completing her BA at the University of New Delhi in Government and Politics, before shifting course and moving to the United States to pursue design. Singh landed in Chicago where she attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, earning her MFA in Visual Communication Design. Soon after, she relocated to Brooklyn and began working for the digital design firm, Sagmeister & Walsh.
As a contracted digital artist, her portfolio is a mixed one with many of her works designed to suite a particular company, publication, or event’s chosen/curated aesthetic. A quick glance through her professional projects shows deft adaptation to whatever type of work is thrown her way – whether it’s the Wallstreet Journal’s The Future of Everything magazine, or a project for Apple, Pearle Agre, Frooti, Appy Fizz, Macy’s or Baboon.
Her more personal works, however, share a more unified identity. They’re tongue-in-cheek, playful, bold, and most often abstract or non-figural. Her own animation, photography, and graphic design seem almost freehand – they’re emotional and unconstrained and, at times, bear sharp contrast to her tidy contracted works. For the best sense of the her style, just check out they way she designed her website. Singh refuses to conform: https://katyayanisingh.com/.
Singh produced I’m Sleeping before the pandemic, somehow, with an eye to the future. She explores isolation and desperation in the relationship between a mother and daughter separated by time and distance, mediated through a smart phone. Singh notes, “I noticed the correlation between the medium I was using to retain contact with her, and its own properties. The way a phone uses terminology like ‘Snooze’ when in choosing to delay time, I was enacting the same avoidance through text.”
The isolation and loneliness the piece convey are feelings familiar to many right now. While Singh considers speaking her mind toward the end of the piece, typing out “I’m Sad” or “I’m Lonely” to finally unmask herself, she ultimately chooses to veil her true feelings beneath paradox (typing “Im Sleeping”) and retreat further into herself. The artist fluctuates pacing and rhythm to dissolve any sense of a timeline or chronology. Its erratic and disconnecting presentation intends to overwhelm, just as quarantine might.
Come see the entire video this fall in our collection exhibition!