Preetika Rajgariah at Bill Arning Exhibitions
Preetika Rajgariah’s exhibition “Pleasure Tense” provides a fragile layered inquiry into the connections between contact, texture, and selfhood. The artist collages household and community-sourced saris onto recycled yoga mats to create, in accordance with the present’s press launch, a type of “pleasure centered” queer self-portraiture that defies the othering gaze of the white heterosexual patriarchy. A lot of the saris Rajgariah makes use of are skinny and translucent, and from afar have a paint-like high quality. But the artworks demand our scrutiny to disclose their distinct textures and surfaces. The artist’s bodily presence is in all places in these objects—in spite of everything, yoga mats, of their on a regular basis use, are supposed to be touched. However regardless of this sense of intimacy, viewers shall be compelled to barter their distance earlier than these photographs.
The yoga mats are changed into canvases—conventional Western units for rendering pictorial area that forces the spectator to soak up the work at a essential take away. Furthermore, these kinds of mats—created within the early Nineteen Eighties by an Englishwoman named Angela Farmer—are commercialized mementos of the greater than five-thousand-year-old cultural follow. Rajgariah additionally challenges the temptation to really feel the varied sari textures by the truth that her queer physique, ecstatic and infrequently unabashedly nude, is the one compositional ingredient collaged with the material. The will to the touch the fragile saris is each seductive and damaging, because the 2022 self-portrait you’re the grasp of your judgements, your selections, and your actions—the place the artist depicts her disembodied arms gently holding or tearing aside meals at a dinner desk—playfully however forcefully signifies. Rajgariah’s bindi-covered mirrors complicate issues even additional: Her mom used to depart behind her bindis on a mirror in her residence from worry of being judged by her predominantly white neighbors in Texas. To see oneself mirrored in these surfaces may both be consoling or discomforting, relying on who you’re.
Rajgriah’s presentation is a reminder that the act of reclaiming one’s identification and embracing one’s sexuality is a by no means a simple path. It’s a journey entangled with the fabric histories of the physique, sundry cultural narratives, and the imperial gaze.
— Salome Kokoladze
