THE SELF-PORTRAIT COLLECTION

Ashok's life-changing accident -- the explosion of his brain at the age of 25 -- changed his art;  from devoting his works to subject matter of all sorts, he began focusing primarily on self-portraits. In doing so, he used his art to explore the nature of his own life, his own being, under the lens of having faced his own annihilation.  The following are his self-portraits from 2018, with his personal descriptions and meanings of the works.  Welcome to the faces of a survivor: a brain-damaged, blinded, epileptic, metal-skulled, amnesiac, Hindu, brown-redneck, brain tumor-bearing, Indian American biomythographer from New York City.