Strata bouquet (uncertain allies)
2021
boulders, pulverized rock pigment and earth pigment paint on canvas, stainless steel
96 x 123 x 40 inches
This work was produced thanks to the support of the City of Los Angeles (C.O.L.A.) Master Artists Fellowship.
CATALOG ESSAY:
Download COLA catalog essay with images here.
On Neha Choksi’s Strata bouquet (uncertain allies), 2021
Strata bouquet (uncertain allies) makes reference to Neha Choksi’s embodied personhood, in only the oblique way that all art objects refer back to their artists. Choksi’s ongoing engagement with rock, stone and the processes of extraction allow us to witness her interactions, holding, throwing, and kicking the material. Evidence of these acts can be read like handprints. Here, the invisible forces of tension and gravity, weight and balance, are at first more evident than the artist’s labor. The artist’s mark is the existence of the art object itself.
Choksi’s installation emerges from a correspondence of material, physics, and rhythm. Seven tall canvases of slightly differing widths hang on the wall in stately formation. However, they escape categorization as “only” paintings or wall works: each one has a corresponding boulder placed several feet in front of it. These are connected by two elements: canvas straps, stretched taut at an angle, and steel strips, which lay flat on the ground. From each of the seven boulders, seven cylinders have been hollowed out with the extracted material used to make corresponding sets of pigments that color the straps and canvases. Each strap has been moved one panel to the right and passes through the cored holes, creating a visual and physical cohesiveness that plays with color and form, separation and connection. The widths of the straps have also determined the spacing of the canvases while the pigments made from crushing the extracted stone have been enhanced with other natural materials from the earth to mimic the color of the boulders. These illusionary interventions by Choksi disrupt simplistic divisions between nature and culture, the given and the made. The contrast of the straight lines of the canvas with the rough forms of the boulders similarly call attention to these binaries only to dispel them. The artist’s body relies on time to make marks on these stones, just as the earth does.
This installation is a conceptual variant from Choksi’s other work with stone, given that specifics of geographical origin are less important than their diversity of material, age, and location. Sourced across the United States, the different types of rocks are the result of disparate raw elements, earthly processes, and geological lifetimes. Human systems then make it possible for such boulders to exist for purchase, thus beginning their recognized entry into the realm of culture. The title—Strata bouquet—denotes this collapsing of time, space, and scale made possible by multiple interventions. The word stratum first emerged in the 16th century—in the age of Dutch painted still lives implied by Choksi’s use of bouquet in the title—meaning to layer or cover, that is, a gesture performed. The etymology of the word constitutes a collapsing in itself, with strata containing simultaneous meanings established at various historical moments, pertaining to geology, surfaces and structures, social categorizations, and statistics.
The world increasingly bears the burden of our demands and our gaze. With this in mind, Choksi disturbs our assumptions regarding the organic and the manufactured by penetrating the solidity of a rock. Her pulverization of stone results in a slippage from nature to culture. Materially speaking, a painting is just pigment and art production demands the extraction of matter. In the dynamics of probing and making, reflection and representation, there exist the possibilities of both parasitism and reciprocity. Given this, what kind of allies can we, as artists, makers, and humans, be to the earth?
—Ana Iwataki
RELATED WORKS
Stone Breath Mountain Dust, 2016
Dust to Mountain, 2016
Liberty Matter, 2017 (featuring Insurrection, 2017 and A Stone’s Throw, 2017)
Ahimsa series, 2020
The Weight of the Cave, 2021
Uncertain Allies, 2021
Porous Earth, 2024
and more
Credits | photo: Ruben Diaz, Jake Courtois, et al. | video footage: Jake Courtois
