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Knight, Christopher
"Review: Zarina Hashmi imprints herself in paper"
[[underline]]Los Angeles Times [[underline]]
November 21, 2012

LUHRING AUGUSTINE
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By Christopher Knight, Los Angeles Times Art Critic
November 21, 2012|4:47 p.m.

For Zarina Hashmi, an Indian-born American artist who often goes by her first name alone, a sheet of paper is a place as much as it is a thing.  

In the retrospective exhibition of nearly 45 years of the printmaker's work now at the UCLA Hammer Museum, a black-and-white 2001 woodcut is completely abstract, but it manages to picture a place while also being one.  A thick, erratic black line meanders down a sheet of off-white handmade paper from the upper right to the lower left, dividing it in two. You can't tell just by looking, but the jagged line describes a section of the long, contentious border running between the secular state of India and what became the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, created at the end of colonial British rule in 1947.  

Look closely, and the prominent line has been formed by gouging out the wooden printing plate on either side, then inking what was left behind.  Faint cut marks surround the line are still visible, as if a violent flurry of gashes across the surface has left behind a dominant scar.  The division is a remnant of loss.  

Yet all is not bleak.  In removing hundreds of small nicks, slices and bits of wood, the artist's unseen blade also allowed light into what would otherwise be a murky, all-black place.  The mostly unprinted portions of the sheet are lively and spirited, bristling sites of teeming activity.  And the printed sheet is tactile, even somewhat coarse, revealing the individuality and lovely eccentricity of handmade paper.    

Look more closely still, and Zarina's woodcut turns out to be mounted on top of a second sheet of paper.  

The warm, white sheet underneath is smooth and clear-even elegant.  (It's Arches Cover paper, a high-quality, industrially milled cotton-paper produced since the 1500s in France and prized for many types of archival printing.)  Quietly but unmistakably, the subtle layering of two different papers heightens the sense of physical division-the jagged black line operating in two dimensions, the layered papers in three.