Manifest diversity

Cultures come together at the Brush

by Leon Nigrosh

HOME? CROSSCURRENTS IN CONTEMPORARY SOUTH ASIAN/AMERICAN ART
at the Brush Art Gallery, 256 Market Street, Lowell, through April 15.

According to curator E. Linda Poras, "South Asian artists living in America are confronted with the challenge of maintaining their cultural heritage while adapting to the conventions

of contemporary art, and somehow managing to define themselves in the process." The nine artists represented in the current exhibition at the Brush Art Gallery have conquered this situation with a mixture of sincerity, professionalism, and often a strong dose of sarcastic humor.

The most blatantly funny works in the show are from Annu Palakunnathu Matthew's Bollywood Satirized series. Digitally altering actual movie posters from "Bollywood" (Bombay, India's soundstages churn out nearly 1000 movies a year), Matthew offers us images like Dowry Violence which shows a young man menacing a fearful woman with a knife. The dialog states, "Tell your parents to get me a Honda or I'll kill you." In What Will People Think?, a young man and woman are featured in a tender embrace with key words running over their bodies. On his arms we can read words like "experience," "lady's man," and "amorist." The girl is labeled "tramp," "whore," and "soiled goods." After the initial chuckles, it becomes obvious that these posters aren't really very humorous after all. British-born Matthew was raised in India and is now living in the US, married to an American. From her intimate encounters with Indian culture she uses these posters to serve as reminders that, even in the 21st century, Indian women are still repressed and discriminated against.

Massachusetts photographer Sejal Patel came to the States when she was six years old. Much of what she knows of India she gleaned from her grandmother's tales of home life, and she often wonders what her life would be like if she had never come to the US. Patel's black and white photo series If I were back in India, who would I be? is a group of portraits of herself dressed in traditional Indian garb carrying out a day of women's chores. There's a subtle irony to the images of modern Patel sitting splay-legged on the ground smelling a pot of yogurt to see if it's still edible, returning with a jar of water on her head, or rolling out a meal's worth of tortilla-like roties.

Allegiances could get complicated for Sabina Zeba Haque, born in the US of Indian and American parents, but raised in Pakistan, and eventually returning to the States. Fifty years ago, her Norwegian grandmother forswore her native language and assimilated into America's melting pot. Today, Haque tries to retain the best of all her cultural backgrounds, and to sort out the meanings through her artwork. Her site-specific work, Come Home, covers an entire gallery wall with a flag of red and white stripes with a green field. The stripes obviously refer to the US while the green refers to the Pakistani flag. The large, mixed media self-portrait sports the crescent moon and single star also found on the flag of Pakistan, but this star has six points. A number of "Fatima" hands flank her face, an icon more readily recognized as a Hamsa hand which in some cultures helps ward off the evil eye, and in others symbolizes the hand of God. These apparent incongruities serve to heighten our awareness in the multi-cultural aspect of Haque's work.

Siona Benjamin is a Sephardic Jew from India living in the states, whose parents remain in India while much of her family has emigrated to Israel. With such a background, Benjamin has often felt that she could never "set deep roots no matter where she [was]." These feelings provide the impetus for her exotic gouache and gold leaf on paper Finding Home Series, several of which are on display. Like the others in the series, #35 (Khamoshi) is, in a manner of speaking, a self-portrait based on traditional Indian miniatures. Here we see a four-armed, pregnant woman, painted blue like the Indian god Vishnu, seated on a mat rendered in typical vertical perspective. She's holding a tiny house with the holy Hebrew blessing Shema written on it, looking at another hand with seven fingers that represents a Jewish menorah, all of which is surrounded by a red border of war implements that reflect Durga, the 10-armed Hindu goddess. Through the fusion of all these disparate cultural and artistic elements, Benjamin, like her colleagues, presents the overriding message of this exhibition: that we should tolerate, and then come to appreciate, the tremendous diversity that is humanity.

The Brush Art Gallery is open Wednesday through Sunday from noon to 4 p.m. Beginning April 1, Tuesday through Saturday from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Sunday from noon to 4 p.m. Call 978-459-7819.