Ruhee Maknojia: Pattern and Power

Maknojia utilizes the dichotomy of these two societies to propose global questions about contemporary ethics, values, and power structures in an ever-growing and interconnected world. The viewer will enter Maknojia’s fictional, sublime world of paintings, installation, and animation to learn and discover the intricacies, importance, and ethnology of patterns, emphasizing and identifying their multicultural relationships. Drawing from her environment, growing up in the United States in an Indian-Pakistani home, Maknojia colorfully unfolds traditional wisdom from a place of intuition and intention.
In Maknojia’s work patterns act as a base to speak to contemporary life and embody practices that produce and highlight the intersecting complexities and connections between the local and the global, the individual and the collective. Maknojia studies where historically rich patterns derive – particularly South-Asia and America – as well as what philosophers wrote about these heritage-based motifs, acknowledging these textiles as an active participant in the storytelling process of history. She then transforms the enigmatic motifs and shapes into what the artist calls Magicalscapes, dually fictitious and historical imagery that is purposely left open-ended to encourage the viewer to create their own end to this alternative story of history.