Kanishka Raja paints alluring interior scenes that draw you in with their splashy color and straightforward-looking, rather stylized iconography, then twist you around as their multiple fictions and illusions become apparent. In one painting, a meticulously painted, properly generic hotel room (complete with a dead-on rendition of the little camp chair in the closet for your suitcase) appears to open straight out onto the great out-doors; in another, a wood-paneled suburban basement, accessorized with ping pong table and bar bells, recedes into impossible angles, beautifully appointed. And in this painting too, nature has an improbably meeting with the domestic, here in the form of a window (or is it a poster?) of a wonderfully remote wooded scene, carved into a "window" in the basement’s subterranean, exposed rock wall.

Raja's skill with paint and imagery is intensified by his layering of meaning in these absorbing works. Raised in Calcutta, Raja received his BA at Hampshire College and his MFA at Southern Methodist University in the United States. His sensitivity to conventions of visual language may be in part due to the fact that he did not grow up with Western perspective as a "mother tongue" and thus he is able to juggle and exploit the dislocations between the traditionally flat, layered language of Indian painting, and the very different approach to flattening space that he learned in America. In general, Raja's keen eye for idioms of representation and his wit at toying with them are one key to the pleasure these works bring.

As Raja describes his work: "The spaces these images inhabit are fictions of multiplicity. They allude to interiors, private and public, physical and psychological: hotels, airport lounges, anonymous bedrooms. I am interested in ways that coded visual languages are transmitted and translated across cultures and the ways in which their newly transformed selves find a function and a place within their adopted homelands. I find myself simultaneously immersed in this sprawling cultural complex and standing just outside of it. The spaces thus invented are fragmentary in nature: suggestions and recollections of arenas that offer a richer and more complex existence. It is an odd sort of privilege to be living in many places at once."

Raja was the recipient, in 2000, of a Fellowship to the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and was recently featured in exhibitions at Bellwether Gallery in Brooklyn and at Exit Art in New York City.

Justin Lieberman creates artwork that often takes the form of a darkly humorous running commentary on many aspects of American culture, from art history to pop music to political theory. For example, in a recent piece, Lieberman pulled the words "yes," "no," and "baby" from 300 pop songs, then linked these sound bites together to create a soundtrack which he displayed in front of a "garbage poem" - a video composed of over 250 days of slop buckets being poured into the trash can. The juxtaposition calls into question the cliché emotional content of pop music by isolating these emotive words and looping them over an image of garbage. Lieberman did extensive research for both the audio and video channels of this piece by working for six months as a dishwasher in an alternative religious community and six months as a record store clerk. For our exhibition, Lieberman will be exhibiting at least one of his stuffed figures of a Klu Klux Klan man wearing a tie-dyed robe. His "Klansman" is both repugnant and clownlike, and acts as a symbol of two failed ideologies: KKK and utopian hippie culture, which he Lieberman experienced in the rural North Carolina town where he grew up.

Lieberman is a 1999 graduate of the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. His work was recently exhibited at LFL Gallery in New York City.

ALLSTON SKIRT GALLERY is located at 450 Harrison Avenue, third floor, Boston, MA. We are open Wednesday - Saturday, from 11 a.m. - 5 p.m. For more information, please call Randi Hopkins or Beth Kantrowitz at 617-482-3652. www.allstonskirt.com.