Event
Distant Bystander
Priya N. Green
Real Art Ways presents Distant Bystander; a solo exhibition by Priya N. Green
Priya N. Green’s work delves into the fragile interplay between sight, perception, and reality. Anchored in the relentless repetition of images from the 24-hour news cycle, Green’s paintings grapple with the tension between agitation and desensitization. This constant barrage of mediated visuals shapes her response: a search for emotional connection amidst the noise.
Rooted in large-scale oil paintings, Green’s recent series draws from found images of protests and crowds in India. As the daughter of Indian immigrants, Priya’s art has long been a way of tracing her ties to family and heritage. Yet, technology complicates these connections. Screens, paradoxically, bring us closer while magnifying a sense of distance. They serve as both portals and barriers, framing the world while distancing us from its immediacy.
During the pandemic, this dissonance became sharper, as life was filtered through glowing devices. Priya N. Green’s paintings are an exploration of this modern condition—our yearning for presence in an increasingly mediated reality.
Distant Bystander was curated by Peter Albano.
About the Artist
Priya N. Green (b. 1986 New Jersey) is an artist whose layered oil paintings explore ideas of reality and perception through the pervasive images found in the news. Green’s work forms a response to the phenomenological impact of abs orbing information and seeking truth through the screen. She uses the materiality of paint to address the veracity of the photographic images that have penetrated the twenty-first century psyche. As the granddaughter of a Bollywood screenwriter, Green believes her fascination with images is an inherited trait. By extracting and manipulating these images through paint, she forms an emotional connection to these events that are otherwise intangibly experienced through a screen.
Green received a BFA from Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University and an MFA from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Green has shown her work nationally at many institutions including the Jersey City Museum, University Museum of Contemporary Art, Zimmerli Art Museum, and the School of the Art Institute in Chicago. In 2023, Green had her first museum solo exhibition at the D’Amour Museum of Fine Arts at the Springfield Museums in Springfield, MA. She has been recognized with numerous awards including the international Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant and a fellowship from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. In 2023, Green’s work was featured in John Seed’s book More Disruption: Representation in Flux, a poignant survey of forty-three internationally acclaimed painters whose works address issues of realism within contemporary painting. Green’s work is collected both privately and in public institutions such as the Springfield Museums, University Museum of Contemporary Art at UMass Amherst, Forbes Library, and Western New England University.
Green lives and works in Springfield, MA with her husband, artist Andrae Green, and their three children.
