Neha Choksi
Works available
A Childs Grove (Coxcomb, Cloud Tree, Rabbits Hole, Pollard Trunk)
Stainless Steel
Various dimensions
Biography
A Child's Grove (Coxcomb, Cloud Tree, Rabbit's Hole, Pollard Trunk) by Neha Choksi is an installation of four stainless steel trees. The works originate from children's line drawings of trees which are roughly a third larger than human scale. They provide a naive window to frame a view and to contemplate the distance between adulthood and childhood. Three of the trees stand harmoniously together while one, Pollard Trunk is the outsider.
Much of Choksi's artwork about plants has required a double take--as early as 1995 she painted precisely over a living ficus tree, entrapping it, its pot and soil in paint, and covering up any blemishes along the way. More recently she showed "Leaf Exchange," a pair of photographs that present two plants before and after their leaves have been swapped from one to the other, and "Leaf Fall", a video that records a crew of actors defoliating an entire peepul tree over the course of a single day, leaving behind a single sprig. There is often an element of the absurd and the traumatic in her projects' operations. Her current cycle of work is guided by a related sensibility and uses the ideas of absence and abeyance to tease out iterations of our tragic-comic relationships with the natural world.
Neha Choksi (b. 1973, United States) has shown work in Los Angeles, New York, Madrid, Amsterdam, Sydney, Istanbul, Delhi, Bombay, and as part of the 10th Venice Architecture Biennale. Her next solo show will be at Carl Berg Projects in 2010.