Pattern and Power, 2023

Pattern and Power, first exhibited at Anya Tish Gallery, is a series of paintings that utilize vibrant heritage-based patterns to bridge ordinary moments of modern life with concepts of philosophy, history, and storytelling. This particular collection of paintings associates 10th-16th-century poetic fables with mundane moments from contemporary life. Each painting is adorned with historically significant patterns influenced by Asian and American textile cultures, creating a narrative experience where decorative elements actively participate in the storytelling process.

The paintings delve into the visual possibilities that arise when tales like “The Case of the Animals versus Man” by Ikhwan al-Safa unfold in the present day. It explores possible relationships that can form between literary masterpieces originating from eastern oral traditions and the current visual art space. Traditionally, these fables often contained themes such as caring for nature, questioning social power structures, and combating the dissemination of falsehoods. The oeuvre examines how medieval fables from the continent of Asia continue to convey wisdom that transcends its cultural and geographical origins and remains relevant curiosities to this day.

Paisley’s Odyssey, 2023
Creature in the Dark, 2023 and Kalila and Dinma, 2023 (right)
Selections from Magicalscapes, 2023
Case of the Animals Versus Man Before the King of the Jinn, 2023

Majority Rule, 2023

Majority Rule
Exhibited at Sanman Studios in Houston, TX. May 2023

Majority Rule is a group exhibition of artist featuring work from Leticia Bajuyo, Brandon Tho Harris, Kill Joy, Matt Manalo, Ruhee Maknojia, Anthony Pabillano, Jagdeep Raina, and Sajeela Siddiq curated by Erika Mei Chua Holum at Sanman Studios.

The Exhibition draws on storytelling, myth-making, and survival strategies of South and Southeast Asian artists in Houston to consider forms of connected knowledge in the Global South, such as warm-weather solidarities, humid climates, and tropical futures as a way to preserve and elevate artistic practices located within and along cultural political, and geographic peripheries. Ranging from rapidly dissolving coastlines to tropical paradieses, the artists and communities along seacoasts, archipelagos, and oceanic geographies have sustained and preserved ways of coming together even amidst displacement, diaspora, and migration. Throughout the show, the artworks and activations propose “looking south” as a method of resistance to hegemonic solutions driven by perspectives from the global north.

Locating the estuaries, bayous, and swamplands of Houston as spaces of hybrid climates, biodiversity, and cultural plurality, we look toward majority-initiated survival to imagine a future for ourselves. Majority Rule is an invocation of community- building through a variety of mediums- the exhibition space, the dinner table, the artist workshop, and the conversation

between friends and strangers- as a way to speculate beyond individualism, scarcity, and catastrophe towards conviviality, communality, and connectedness.

Meditation Room
8ft x 6ft x 7ft
Acrylic on Canvas, Banarasi Sari, Blue Rug
Entangled
20in x 16in
Acrylic on Canvas
Quarantine
20in x 16in
Acrylic on Canvas
Fishing
20in x 16in
Acrylic on Canvas
Womanhood
20in x 16in
Acrylic on Canvas

One Flower | One Life, 2022

One Flower | One Life
Exhibited at Box 13 ArtSpace in Houston, TX. March 2022
24ft x 23ft x 9.5ft

On 11th March 2020, the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a global pandemic. Uncertain how long the pandemic would last or how threatening it would be to American citizens, the artist, Ruhee Maknojia, stamped one red flower for every American life lost to the virus from 11th March 2020 to 31st December 2021. The Stamped flowers symbolically illustrate human fragility. Eventually the data collection process transformed into an art installation titled, “One Flower | One Life” 

The installation of parchment paper hanging from the ceiling to floor was first exhibited at Box 13 ArtSpace in Houston, TX. The paper displays flowers for every American life lost to COVID-19 and a date marking the number of individuals who passed on a particular day. The project is here to help viewers grapple with the magnitude of lives lost by visualizing over 900,000 of them as small stamped flowers and what that might mean for those who experience the installation. Due to size constraints of the exhibition space. The installation and following images only show a small fraction of COVID-19 deaths. Viewers are currently looking at those lives lost from 11th March 2020 to 24th July 2020, totaling 137,678 flowers | lives.

Happiness Curriculum, 2019

In July 2018, the government of Delhi, India initiated an educational program called “The Happiness Curriculum” to decrease anxiety, depression, and intolerance in students up to grade eight. Inspired by India’s meditation initiative, this art installation, also titled “Happiness Curriculum,” explores the possibilities of meditation in spaces of dysfunction. The project is a four-walled space where viewers are invited to sit inside a dimly lit room surrounded by vibrant paintings. A geometric sound and video projection play over the paintings, bringing life to still images. The paintings on the surface appear vibrant, colorful, and “happy”. The more time the viewer spends in the room, however, the more the video installation projects out a haunting sound and claustrophobic-like pattern. The project questions mental health in the American context by inviting viewers in a university setting to experience comfort and discomfort in one breath.

Installation at Eastern Connecticut State University, CT [20 ft x 17 ft x 11.5 ft]
7 minuets and 55 seconds animation and audio running in a loop, layers of hand painted glassine paper. Paper cut outs with an x-Acto knife, canvas, drop cloth, 31 small wood panels 10 in x 8 in. oil and acrylic paintings, hand knotted Iranian rug, projector. 

The Garden, 2019

The Garden is an art installation that is entirely hand-painted and hand-built. The project developed around the aesthetics and philosophies of 16th-century Mughal gardens in India, and utilizes this system of thought to realign social and traditional relations to raise questions about power, ethics, and values in contemporary life.
Mughal-style gardens such as those found in present-day India, Pakistan, Iran, and Afghanistan are four-walled intramural spaces. Historically, philosophers wrote about these gardens in binary terms; the interior represented perfection, relaxation, and peace, while the exterior represented dysfunction, distress, and chaos.
Presented in the following slides, “The Garden” installation, seeks to carve out illumination and stability in the milieu of chaos by questioning what it means to open the gates between the internal space of serenity and an external world of disorder. The art is continuously shaped and reshaped by the perforation of exoteric problems into an area of esoteric “perfection.” The artist uses painted patterns and repetition to seek beauty in abstract spaces of distress. 

The Wallach Art Gallery, Lenfest Center for the Arts in New York City
24 hour sound of running water, A green light bulb, paper pathways, bells made from tin metal, water fountain built from an old bowl and found water pump in Watson Hall Columbia University, drop cloth, canvas, oil paintings, acrylic paintings, paper cut outs, birchwood, foam boards, and crimson dyed red carpet. 10ft x 12ft x 8ft.

Visualizing the Tradition of Folklore, 2019

The following slides are a painting installation titled “Visualizing the Tradition of Folklore.” The artwork is 12 ft x 8.8 ft and the installation also contains 16 smaller 10 in x 8 in paintings on top of the backdrop. The exhibition explores the folklore tradition of storytelling and how stories from India can travel across borders and into unexpected neighborhoods such as Harlem, New York. The miniature paintings host imagined characters from Gujrati folklore but are repurposed to an American context.

Exhibition titled Harlem Perspectives II presented at The Faction Art Projects Gallery, Harlem, New York City
Twenty-one wood panels sized at 10in x 8in, drop cloth sewn together in three parts, acrylic and oil paint. Full installation 12ft x 8.8ft