NEW GALLERY LOCATION SPACE:  B380, 3rd floor in the blue building @ PDC

Neha Choksi, Recent Video Works

Exhibition Dates:  March 25 – May 7, 2010

OPENING RECEPTION – Thursday, March, 5- 8PM

Gallery Hours: Tuesday – Friday, Noon to 5 pm, or by appointment.

Carl Berg Projects is pleased to present three video installations by Neha Choksi in our first solo exhibition of her works since 2005. Related drawings, paintings and photographs accompany these video works.  This selection is drawn from an extensive all-media multi-disciplinary practice, and is a follow-up to her successful exhibitions in India.

In this exhibition the artist continues her long-standing use of the absurd and traumatic as poetic devices to unpack the bare minima of existence.

The video works, Minds to Lose and Leaf Fall, are the first two parts of a trilogy in which largely unscripted performances form the basis to explore presence as created by absence.  How much can you give up, efface, or divest, and still be? Stemming from the psychologically stressed imagination of the artist, the videos color in the emotional world of one who would anesthetize her self and four farm animals, or who would orchestrate the removal of all the leaves from a sacred tropical tree, the ficus religiosa.

Minds to Lose, a six-channel video work, exploits the handheld home-video format to create a forced familial commonality between humans and animals–specifically, two goats, one sheep, a donkey, and the artist–as they submit to anesthesia and the subsequent loss of consciousness.  Originally part of a live performance in which visitors could pet the farm animals milling around the sedated artist, the videos are shown on their own for the first time.  They are paired with a series of small-format drawings that sketch the absented personality of the sedated creatures, human and animal.

Leaf Fall records a single day’s work of stripping a rural peepul tree of all its leaves, save an autumnal sprig at the tip of a single high branch.  This lyrical sunrise to sunset look at a process of laying bare, of stripping away everything until the ordinary is made singular, is a picture of severe loss as a starting point for life’s renewal.  The accompanying large paintings of scenes from Leaf Fall, one black and the other white, are stripped of color, shading, and realistic detail.  Foreground and background merge as a method to unify the surrounding air with each leaf, to mend the space it occupies with its absence, and thus to trace the more basic forces of life.  As bright as the sun will shine depicts in all-black the moment of fullness just before the thinning. The sight of our heart’s desire is an all-white painting of the autumnal sprig surrounded by denuded branches.

The final part of the trilogy, Ice Boat, is under production and will debut at Project 88 in Mumbai in January 2011.  In a gesture of worldly abnegation, Choksi has lived with and interacted with a community of ascetic Jain renunciates. The unspoken gestures of their experiences will provide the heuristic framework to intercut footage of the artist rowing a boat of ice out into the ocean until it melts and she flounders.

In The Weather Inside Me (Looped Bombay Sunset), the footage of a single setting sun is manipulated to parcel and proliferate time, by varying the rates of the same sun’s travel on variously color-shifted obsolete tube-television sets.  Time branches and distends and it then resets to shades of black, simultaneously.

Neha Choksi received her MA in Classics from Columbia University in 2000, and her BAs in Greek and in Art from UCLA in 1997.  Her work has been shown in London, New York, Madrid, Amsterdam, Sydney, Istanbul, Delhi, Bombay, and as part of the 10^th Venice Architectural Biennale in 2006.  Her outdoor sculpture was selected for the sculpture park section of the Frieze Art Fair in 2009.  Her work is represented in the collections of major art foundations and institutions in India, and in significant private collections worldwide.  She is represented by Project 88 in India, where she will have shows in May 2010 and January 2011.  She serves on the editorial board of X-TRA, an arts journal published out of Los Angeles.  She lives and works in Bombay and Los Angeles.  This is Neha Choksi’s first solo exhibition in the United States since 2005.