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

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More equivocal than most of her prints, however, the sculptures' material history isn't often considered in the way paper's is. The poetic resonance of their relationship to tradition is muddled.

One exception is "Blinding Light" (2010), a relatively thick, 6-foot by 3-foot sheet made from gold-leafed layers of elegant Japanese paper. Affixed to an acrylic bar, it hangs several inches in front of the wall. Vertical slits allow glimpses through to the other side, like a screen. The sharp cuts create anomalous shadows against the light-reflective gold, complicating its meditational metaphors for spiritual transition.

Perhaps her best-known work, a woodcut portfolio of 36 geometric abstractions titled "Home Is a Foreign Place" (1999), shows how evocative a simple gesture can be. The shapes are lines, crosses, circles and bars, revealing her long-standing interest in the radical, early-20th century art of Kazimir Malevich. Installed in a grid, the sequence is something like reading about a journey through a house — not just accross a threshold, into a room or looking out a window, but feeling a rush of warm air and glimpsing a shaft of passing light.

Each print is inscribed with a caption in Urdu, once-prominent South Asian language now in flux and global patterns of social and cultural power shift. In this quietly compelling suite of prints, the sheet of paper is simultaneously foreign and home. That's a poetic and pertinent place to be.

chistopher.knight@latimes.com