Los Angeles and Mumbai-based Neha Choksi makes work in various media, including performance, video, sculpture, photo, sound, and hybrid installations. Often her work explores how we seek, experience and acknowledge absentings and transformations in material, temporal and psychological terms. Increasingly her work includes her own intellectual, cultural and social contexts. She does this by setting up simple situations and memorable interventions, disrupting logic to open a space for poetry, absurdity, humour, surprise and existential insight.
Of the Integrity series, of which Repeat Integrity (Oak) is one, she says, ‘For each work I took a sheet of veneer and exploited its grain to create woodcuts of some simplicity. Typically in a woodcut you gouge into the surface of the wood, removing the parts you don’t want to print, ink the surface left in relief and make a woodcut. Instead, I cut a circle into the entire piece of veneer, with the blade mark leaving its kerf missing, rotated the circle in the same plane, and then followed the traditional method of hand-inking and hand-printing with a barren.
The woodcut lines that create the circle also detach the circle from the surrounding material. The pattern of the grain is disrupted, the connection broken, the communication ever so slightly connected.
In Repeat Integrity I inked the woodcut normally for the first print but did not wipe my matrix clean as one would in order to print again. I then re-inked over it with exponentially ever more ink with each printing, thus obscuring the matrix over time. The effacement is a revelation of its own.’
Choksi’s work has been exhibited worldwide in galleries, museums, festivals, film screenings, and are in notable public and private collections. Recent institutional solo exhibitions of her work include exhibitions at the Manchester Art Gallery (2017) and the Hayward Gallery Project Space, London (2015). Several new commissions include work for the 20th Biennale of Sydney (2016), Los Angeles Museum of Art at Occidental College (2017), Dhaka Art Summit (2018), 18th Street Arts Center (2018), and the University Art Museum, California State University, Long Beach (2019). Her work has been selected twice for the Sculpture Park at the Frieze Art Fair, London, and was included in the 10th Venice Architecture Biennale.
She was recently honored with the India Today 2017 Award for the Best New Media Artist of the Year and with the designation of 2017/2018 Cultural Trailblazer by the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs. Choksi is on the editorial board of the Los-Angeles arts journal, X-TRA, and is represented by Project 88, Mumbai.
