Oppositions of the Technological Versus the Handmade

Current Listings Project Artist Feature is Kanishka Raja

“The Listings Project. That (not so) secret, welcome-to-the-neighborhood gift for artists moving to New York, still invaluable, at a time when there aren’t very many resources (or welcomes) left at all. I browse it frequently of course (even when I am not looking for anything), listed and found terrific studio mates through it and referred countless friends and colleagues toward it’s wonders. But this goes deeper than that: I’ve known Stephanie since before there even was a Listings Project. Like the Hair Club for Men guy, I’m not only a client, I’m also a friend. May it live on.” -Kanishka

Kanishka is a painter working across media at the intersection of representation, ornament and multiple textile and printing technologies. In composite fields that tap into oppositions of the technological versus the handmade, original versus reproduction and neutral versus contested, Kanishka’s paintings and their woven, scanned, printed, embroidered and reproduced counterparts interlock in complex visual fields that consider the politics of location and territory and are charged with colliding realms of the foreign and the familiar.

Kanishka’s works have been included in solo and group exhibitions at the ICA Boston, the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art (SUNY, New Paltz), ICA Philadelphia and the Rose Art Museum (Brandeis University), among others. In 2016, Kanishka completed work on a major Percent for Art commission from the Department of Cultural Affairs, New York City for a permanent public artwork. Kanishka is the recipient of a 2011 Painters and Sculptors Grant from the Joan Mitchell Foundation and winner of the 2004 ICA Artists’ Prize awarded by the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston.

Learn more at www.kanishkaraja.com

Photo by Kanishka Raja