Nadia Khawaja Exhibition
Thomas Erben Gallery
This event has ended.
Khawaja executes her black felt-tip pen drawings on often large-scale (up to 8’ x 5’) sheets of paper. Part daily routine, part meditation, her work appears to sublimate interior as well as exterior conditions, growing increments of small details into sometimes full-blown fields, sometimes unifying structures. Drawn by hand with a high degree of precision, her lines take on angular, organic or loopy vectors, shaping into swirls, grids or geometry. It is important for Khawaja to enter into a certain rhythm, leaving behind rationality, and to create a space rather than an image, a vision more than an idea, a human capacity rather than a human story.
Khawaja’s videos are equally sensitive, transmuting external forces and sounds into “mark-making.” In Light Sleep, street and car noises punctuate and draw upon the rhythm of breathing and gentle tree-filtered light on the artist’s face. Similarly, Flesh It Out employs the mounting vibrations and sound of an auto rickshaw to hauntingly blur Khajawa’s steady stare at the camera. Unlike the drawings, in which Khawaja seems to exist wholly in her own body, the videos show her engaging with elemental forces.
In many ways, Khawaja’s work resembles the account of a life or of many lives, summarizing the whole while detailing everyday stutters.
Nadia Khawaja received her BFA in 2001 from the National College of Arts, Lahore, studying abroad in 2000 at the Ecole d’Art, Aix-en-Provence, France.
[Image: Detail from "Drawing 43" (2009) Felt-tip pen on paper, 41.5 x 60 in.]
Media
Schedule
from June 09, 2011 to July 22, 2011
Opening Reception on 2011-06-09 from 18:00 to 20:30