Kanishka Raja

Kanishka Rajas ravishingly patterned work, as the artist put it, explores the intersection of representation, craft, technology, and the gaps that occur in the transmission of information. Conceptually heady and aesthetically alluring, Rajas I and I series combines painting with woven, scanned, printed, embroidered and reproduced counterparts. The artist (19692018) transformed a hybrid inheritance the post-colonial confluences of an urban Indian childhood, family roots in textile manufacture and clothing design, a liberal arts and studio education in the US, and a bi-national footing in New York and Kolkata into an extraordinary practice. Strategies of variation, repetition, reversal and mirroring converge in composite fields that tap into oppositionsthe technological versus the handmade, original versus reproduction, and neutral versus contested.