For Avani Bakaya, painting is an act of excavation of memory, habit, and the unconscious. Her works unfold as layered psychological terrains, where repetition, fragmentation, and dreamscapes coexist. Through oil on canvas, oil on tile, and graphite drawings, she creates intimate yet expansive worlds that mirror the cycles of human thought and emotion.
In her series Rinse, Repeat, Avani traces the rhythm of compulsive gestures and routines, turning pencil marks into meditations on memory and time. Works like Sands of Time and Remembrance navigate the fragility of recollection, balancing between erosion and preservation. Meanwhile, pieces such as Lucid Dreaming and Circles of Light drift into surreal registers, spaces where reality dissolves into reverie.
Her practice often holds together contradictions: serenity and disarray, safety and rupture, remembrance and forgetting. Paintings like Safe Haven and Fragments of a Past reveal this tension, situating the home or familiar object as both a comfort and haunting. Through subtle textures, muted palettes, and layered brushwork, Avani captures the way memory resists clarity and always shifting, fragmenting, reforming.
