Project 88 is pleased to announce Neha Choksi’s solo exhibition, Iceboat and Sky Fold, opening on October 3, 2013 and closing on November 16, 2013.
Two works are being shown. Iceboat is a video of a performance in February 2012. Sky Fold is a series of photographic cyanograms made this year during the production of Iceboat.
In Iceboat the artist dresses in white, as if a renunciate or a devotee, and sets herself to row a boat of ice until the boat melts and releases her into the waters. The ultimate melting and floundering is a real experience of loss made vivid in a staged and measured way (just as in Minds to Lose and Leaf Fall). The material of ice is familiar. We know it will melt and lose buoyancy and give a clear end to the performance. It will lighten and relieve.
The artist approached the performance as a poetic exegesis not only on the effort to stay afloat despite the inevitability of failure, but also on striving and surrendering, on coping and release, resistance and collapse. There is nobility and absurdity to the material surrender that hints at the ultimate bodily forfeiture we all must accept.
Choksi’s interest in evanescence and presence, in ‘an affirmative act of destruction’, and in gravity, persists in all her performed and video works: Choksi’s Iceboat, 2013 is the third in a trilogy of work on reticence, absenting, withdrawing, and disengaging. The first two were Leaf Fall, 2008, and Minds to Lose, 2012.
The Sky Fold cyanograms are simple photographic works reflecting only the means of their own production, folded paper and light. The sky is invoked by the choice of the colour cyan and the choice of cyanotype process that was originally used by its inventor, the astronomer John Herschel, for his astronomy notes and diagrams. Here is a blueprint of the folds in the sky, the creases in time—making the sky something we get our hands on.
Choksi’s works have been exhibited worldwide in galleries, museums, festivals, and film screenings; they are in notable public and private collections in the Americas, Europe, Asia and Australia. She is a contributing editor for X-TRA, a quarterly art journal published in Los Angeles. She was born in the United States, raised in India, and formally educated in the Fine Arts and Indo-European philology at UCLA and Columbia University. She lives and works in Mumbai and Los Angeles.
