Exhibition Reception: Neha Choksi Artist Lab

NEHA CHOKSI | ELEMENTARY
September 29 – December 15, 2018
Exhibition Reception
Saturday, December 1, 2018 | 5-8 PM
18th Street Arts Center presents a new exhibition in the Artist Lab featuring Los Angeles-based artist Neha Choksi.
Neha Choksi began a year-long performance this fall, attending an elementary school as a kindergarten student. Elementary is part of Choksi’s larger Play!School! project that questions childhood as a limited category and extends childhood’s epistemic processes to foster new understandings about how we organize and address contemporary civil society. By attending school as an adult, Choksi aims to question many of the boundaries, hierarchies, and fantasies around the “civilizing” process of education. As a lived performance, Choksi’s work reorganizes ideas of art and an artist’s labor for her classmates. The accumulated experience in the classroom during her Play!School! project will help re-shape our perception of who we are and want to be, how we arrive at our ideas about self/other, childhood/adulthood, naïve/civilized, and more.
In 18th Street’s Main Gallery, Choksi’s spacious installation charts her daily interactions and emotions as a student. Absorbing the entire gallery volume, the installation is bisected horizontally to allow her classmates expanded access underneath, a space that adults may not easily occupy. The configuration of her installation changes daily using idiosyncratic scales and functions as a lyrical chronicle of her progression through kindergarten.
The exhibition in 18th Street’s Main Gallery runs from September 29, 2018 through December 15, 2018, with a reception at 18th Street on Saturday, December 1st from 5-8 pm.
Neha Choksi’s residency is supported by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
Image caption: Neha Choksi, Recess with Children, 2018. Photo documentation of workshop at 18th Street Arts Center. Photo: Anuradha Vikram. Courtesy of the artist and 18th Street Arts Center