Neha Choksi (b. 1973, New Jersey, raised in India, lives between Los Angeles and Bombay) works across a range of mediums, including performance, sculpture, painting, video, and installation. The Weight of the Cave is representative of Choksi’s long-standing interest in the history, craftsmanship, and manipulation of stone in her sculptural practice. Over the past decade, Choksi has created sculptures in bronze, steel, concrete, and granite.
Rock in its many forms has served as a material upon which sculptors have enacted their artistic visions for centuries. In The Weight of the Cave, Choksi takes up rock as her focus in both material and subject. The eleven boulders that comprise this work are hickory creek granite, taken from a quarry in the central valley of California in 2016. Mimicking the act of quarrying, Choksi bored into the granite to excise pieces of rock from each of the eleven boulders. She subsequently ground the rock fragments into a fine powder with a mortar and pestle, to which she then added a binding agent to create a type of paint (as she does to achieve most of the pigments in her multimedia practice). In reapplying the thick paint to the boulders as handprints, Choksi returned the pigment to its source while also marking the spot where she would have placed her hands to lift the rocks.
The latter point brings to light the rocks’ relationship to both the human form, and a global human history of artistic creation. Human handprints much like Choksi’s own can be found in caves in countries around the world— Argentina, Indonesia, France, South Africa. These markings, as Choksi observes, operate as universal symbols that assert presence and significance: “I was here. I am making a mark. I am saying I exist. I matter. We matter.” Choksi adds that she also selected these boulders in particular because, at weights between 65 and 190 pounds, they were at a weight that the artist herself at the time could carry, or at least budge through force.
