Mumbaikar will headline American exhibition

A graduate from Mumbai’s JJ School of Art, Siona Benjamin’s Pantomine in Pardes is showcased in top US galleries 

NEW YORK: Mumbai-born artist Siona Benjamin is working double time to complete her mixed-media installation Pantomine in Pardes which will headline a radical group exhibition in New York’s avant garde Wave House. 
 
The art institution invited 11 artists to create new works for its “Ornamental Instincts” exhibition starting on November 23. “Wave gave each artist invited to the show a grant. I had this desire to make a light box — the kind found in cinema theatres. I love movies. I was born in Mumbai so the Bollywood sort of pop culture influence is always going to be there. When I went to the movies I used to stare at the light boxes with movie posters,” Benjamin told DNA from her sunlit home-studio in Upper Montclair.

Benjamin is now yielding to her love for the movies by creating a mixed-media installation pinned on a light box holding one of her collages. She has roped in digital artist Jay Seldin to scan images from three of her old paintings and a photograph of her imposing white turbaned grandfather. Using “computer scissors” Benjamin has created a new composition from the three paintings and the picture. 

“I didn’t just break one of my paintings for the graphic collage. I took one scanned image from here and another character from there. Then I got Lizza Fine Arts Studio to create a transparency of the image. The gilded frame makes it look very Renaissance,” said Benjamin, whose Pantomine in Pardes, lights up in the display box like a television still. Benjamin is also taking part in the “Ceremonies and Celebrations” exhibition in Connecticut’s Alva Gallery.

Benjamin’s paintings touch on questions about what and where is ‘home’ while focusing on issues such as identity, immigration and motherhood. Her painting of a South Asian woman wearing a sari patterned with the American flag, her legs sheathed in the striped pajamas of Nazi concentration camp victims first prompted Manhattan art critics to warm to her work. “I am inspired by traditional styles of painting, like Indian miniatures, Byzantine icons and Jewish and Christian illuminated manuscripts, but I blend these ancient forms with pop cultural elements to create a new vocabulary,” said Benjamin, a New York artist.
 
Benjamin’s works sell for up to $12,000. There is enough demand for Benjamin’s work to spawn $500 limited edition prints of originals.

Benjamin fondly recalls her undergraduate years in Mumbai’s JJ School of Art, “The campus was a haven from the bustle of the bazaars with its Indo-British architecture and stories of Rudyard Kipling walking the shaded pathways of the school. We sat in the leafy lawns, munching on spicy snacks while pouring over books of Rembrandt drawings.”