Allston Skirt Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of “Kanishka Raja: Birth of an Earth”, a solo show of new work by Boston-based, Calcutta-born Raja. Raja is known for his large scale paintings of interior spaces that explore spatial, formal, psychological and narrative issues, as well as themes of historical and cultural representation. In “Birth of an Earth”, a site specific installation created for the gallery’s main exhibition space, Raja presents the first of his new series of paintings of connected interiors that not only work on their own as complex scenarios or episodes, but are also connected to each other, describing a larger entity that is reflected back and forth in various ways, from painting to painting. This larger entity, which Raja envisions as a self-contained universe, is seen in disorienting segments - a long hallway with a partial brick wall, for example, or a long strip of commercial carpeting, each revealing an ambiguity as to the exact function or role of each vignette within the larger whole, and each hinting at previous incarnations that may be purely ad hoc accumulations of private worlds.

Raja describes one impetus for this project as his fascination with the true story of Merhan Karimi Nasseri, a man without a country, living at the Charles De Gaulle Airport in Paris since 1988. For Raja, the stateless limbo of this former Iranian citizen presents an intriguing contrast with the ideal many artists aspire to, of being a citizen of the world in the new Global Village climate of the artworld, and one facet of the multitude of displacements faced in the modern world. The feel and details of that intensely non-place place that is an airport figure heavily in Raja’s work, as does the idea of reflection, both as a physical concept and as a psychological one. In this show, for the first time, Raja moves from pure painting to installation work, as he explores how creating an environment for looking can mimic the process of reflecting and remembering -- the step back, the look from one painting to another, to compare, to piece together, with paintings functioning almost like optical afterimages, resonating with the way we grasp the reality we experience through our eyes.

Raja’s work has been featured most recently in “Pantone”, curated by David Hunt at the Massimo Audiello Gallery in New York, “Masala: Diversity and Democracy in South Asian Art” at the Benton Museum of Art in Storrs, CT and at the Kravets Wehby Gallery in New York. He attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2000, after receiving his MFA from Southern Methodist University in Dallas in 1995. His work is in the permanent collection of Harvard University’s Fogg Art Museum, where it is currently on display. This is his second one person show at Allston Skirt Gallery.

In the Mini Skirt this month, Allston Skirt is pleased to present “Joe Zane: Mise-En-Scene”, a solo exhibition by a newly Boston-based artist. For his installation at the gallery, Zane uses video, drawing and sculpture to imitate a crime scene. The observer is left to build a narrative from viewing the scene, an activity that Zane views as parallel to the process of extracting meaning from art in a gallery or museum setting. In his own words: “It struck me awhile ago that there is this really apt analogy between an art exhibition and a crime scene. Viewers walk into a gallery and look at the evidence of an artists activity and try to piece together some sort of meaning or experience from the clues. So, basically what I have done is make an exhibition that is art as crime scene as art, where I mimic a crime scene and the different elements are art objects.”

In previous work, Zane has explored and intertwined art history with personal history through a series of drawings of influential Conceptual artists working around the time Zane was a youth (the early 1970s), through altering and reworking art books and magazines produced during this period, and through repeated use
of a sculptures/self-portraits found in various settings- perhaps embodying (or disembodying) Warhol’s famous thought that, “Art is short for Artist”.

Zane received his MFA from Cornell University in 2003, and his work has recently been seen in “Just Stand There!”, organized by MIT List Visual Art Center curator Bill Arning at MIT’s Media Test Wall in 2003.