You seem like you have a great sense of style. Does it come through in your work?

You seem like you have a great sense of style. Does it come through in your work? Well, my friends call me the Bollywood chola who’s stuck in Japan. I always loved playing dress up, so I think that’s true of any photo I take—I love dressing people up or admiring somebody dressing up. I spent a lot of time photographing my really good friend Kayvon Zand. [The Zand Collective] are a group of people who just dress really extravagantly and they were like my adopted family. It seems like they’re all about the dressing up, but for me they were the realest people I found. I think with my paintings I’m dressing characters up. I feel like a drag queen sometimes - it’s fun. I don’t feel like myself until I'm all dressed up. That’s true of everything. Do you have any special "getting dressed" rituals before you go out? Yeah. Usually I’ve spent all day finding some weird old movie or finding some book or old magazine article that I’m obsessing over, and that will be what I’m working on in a project, then that night I won’t be able to shake it. It's like an actor who can’t get out of character. So I'll be watching Bollywood movies all day and then I’ll go out and wear a bindi or a sari. Or I'll be reading Anne Sexton, so I’ll be feeling like a tortured poet and I’ll go out all serious. Whatever I’m working on during the day carries on into the night. Sometimes I’ll be in Frida Kahlo mode and I’ll have flowers in my hair, or I’ll go out in a unibrow and my boyfriend will be disgusted. I guess I like to try on my heroes’ clothes. But I definitely got my style cues when I first came to New York from my drag family. Like Ru Paul says, 'We’re all born naked and the rest is drag.'
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