IN THE FUTURE NO ONE WILL HAVE A PAST- An Art Exhibition!!!

A fascinating, vivid, controversial, contemporary paintings exhibit in the city from Oct. 12 to Nov. 17. Catch it if you're around! True to the artist's unique style, the exhibition in itself is divided in two parts, showing at two completely different locations. This dual-gallery show imitates his underlying two-pronged theme-"collisions of the foreign and the familiar-fragmented worlds!"

"His large-scale paintings of strange, disorienting interior spaces play with texture, pattern, and perspective. Raja has described them as “collisions of the foreign and the familiar.” He draws inspiration from the public, though often anonymous, interiors of hotels and airport lounges, as well as from the more intimate domains of bedrooms and family “rec” rooms. Although his paintings are empty of inhabitants, Raja fills them with resonant objects—crates of vinyl records, old exercise equipment, rifles, sneakers—that give clues as to who might reside in these fragmented worlds. " - From The Big Red and Shiny website.

Details: IN THE FUTURE NO ONE WILL HAVE A PAST

A solo exhibition in two parts by:KANISHKA RAJA

When: 12 October - 17 November 2007

Opening Reception: Friday, October 12 from 5 to 7 pm at Tilton and 7 to 9 pm at Envoy

Where: Location 1- Tilton Gallery: 8 East 76th Street (between Madison and Fifth Ave.)

Ph: 212 737 2221 Website: http://www.jacktiltongallery.com/

Location 2- Envoy: 131 Chrystie street (between Broome and Delancey)

Ph: 212 226 4555

Website: http://www.envoygallery.com/

A New York magazine post on the exhibit: http://nymag.com/daily/entertainment/art_candy/

From the event website: "Kanishka Raja's unique blend of pattern and decoration, Op Art and Indian miniature, doubles, mirrors, multiplies and samples a curriculum of surfaces to create complex psychological interiors. Anonymous airport lounges present a world void of inhabitants, yet they are suffused with mysterious signs of human occupation such as tents and army cots, the occasional Playstation or flat screen TV. It has always been a fundamental aspect of the artist's work to explore the collision between traditions of Western perspectival space and the particular conventions of pictorial design in Indian miniature painting. Raja takes his cues from the pre-Renaissance idea of rendering space by collapsing and compressing perspective, an idea which is also explored invideogames. He builds on this information, not just in how spaces are stacked, but also in how things operate inside and outside a frame and how elements from one painting spill over into another as part of the larger continuum.

Raja's current cycle of paintings prominently feature a geometrical pattern that is derived from a photograph of a window grill from the Babri Masjid, a 16th century mosque in Ayodhya, India that was destroyed by Hindu fundamentalists in December 1992. The nationwide riots and bloody reprisals that followed the destruction, culminated in March 1993 when in one morning, 13 bombs ripped through the heart of Bombay. By using the Babri Masjid pattern throughout the work, it becomes the essence of repetition and allows Raja to emphasize historical repetition as well as our persistent political and cultural amnesia. He takes this even further by creating wallpaper from a drawing whose pattern is generated from images of the destruction after the Bombay attacks.

As in Raja's earlier work, the iconography of the airport continues to operate as the quintessential liminal space: the place of arrival and departure. By unfolding the images in a panoramic format he develops a narrative that unfolds in time. This allows for a circularity that becomes the structural metaphor for the ideas of repetition, the idea of reflection, showing that what is in front of us is exactly what is behind us."