“Washing,” 2023, acrylic on canvas, 20 x 16 inches
Note: the following is part of Glasstire’s series of short videos, Five-Minute Tours, for which commercial galleries, museums, nonprofits and artist-run spaces across the state of Texas send us video walk-throughs of their current exhibitions. Let’s get your show in front of an audience.
See other Five-Minute Tours here.
Ruhee Maknojia: Pattern and Power at Anya Tish Gallery, Houston. Dates: September 8 – November 4, 2023.
Via the gallery:
“Anya Tish Gallery is excited to present Pattern and Power, the gallery’s debut solo exhibition of South Asian-American artist Ruhee Maknojia, whose artwork and conceptual research is influenced by the aesthetics and philosophies of Indo-American culture. Maknojia utilizes the dichotomy of these two societies to propose global questions about contemporary ethics, values, and power structures in an ever-growing and interconnected world. The viewer will enter Maknojia’s fictional, sublime world of paintings, installation, and animation to learn and discover the intricacies, importance, and ethnology of patterns, emphasizing and identifying their multicultural relationships. Drawing from her environment, growing up in the United States in an Indian-Pakistani home, Maknojia colorfully unfolds traditional wisdom from a place of intuition and intention.
In Maknojia’s work, patterns act as a base to speak to contemporary life and embody practices that produce and highlight the intersecting complexities and connections between the local and the global, the individual and the collective. Maknojia studies where historically rich patterns derive from – particularly South-Asia and America – as well as what philosophers wrote about these heritage-based motifs, acknowledging these textiles as an active participant in the storytelling process of history. She then transforms the enigmatic motifs and shapes into what the artist calls Magicalscapes, dually fictitious and historical imagery that is purposely left open-ended to encourage the viewer to create their own end to this alternative story of history.”
