The Rasa 1-0, is a photography series that was produced first by implementing an iPhone camera to capture found objects and common occurrences. Collaborating with Bridge Photographic Studio, Mistri worked with Chris Allan and master printer David Frawley to manipulate the iPhone images in postproduction and create gelatin silver, archival pigment, and Mouillé prints. Mistri utilizes PDM™, which enables minute manipulation of individual pixels. Furthermore, through the Mouillé Process, color and tone relationships are exhaustively translated through a unique color form model, taking ten-fold more time and material to craft than modern pigment prints. Both of these proprietary processes, developed by Allan, were pivotal to achieving the final works.

Decisively focusing his photography on subject matter encountered in daily life, Mistri attempts to evoke rasa, a concept in Indian aesthetic theory that suggests there is an essential element in any visual, literary, or performing art work that can only be suggested, not described. Mistri explains, “Rasa is the non-material essence. It is the dialogue created between an effective presentation of art in any form and the participating spectator.”

His gelatin silver print Smoke 1, NYC (2013) forms a double helix, the mathematical symbol for infinity. It implies our ability to comprehend the transition from line to plane, to cylinder, to circle, to sphere, as well as the transformation from the physical to the ethereal. Sophia, Skype (2013), an iPhone-captured Skype call, invites the viewer to consider an emotion suspended in cyberspace and the effect the Internet has on redefining our collective conception of closeness. We need not inhabit the same place or time of day to be together in the present moment.