ARTIST TEXT:
The Prior Presence series continues the project that was started with the 2014 Missing Monuments, of not making a sculpture by making one anyway. Choksi goes to a foundry empty-handed and uses the wax bits that are normally applied to a wax model only to be later cut away in the bronze casting process. These added bits, in the normal order of things, are deleted to reveal the originally intended sculpture. The paradox is in investigating the absence of any “real” or “original” sculpture by making the lost-wax production elements into bronze sculptures in their own right. Neha Choksi gathers various sizes of the wax cups, sprues and vents used by a particular foundry and creates teetering assemblies that are then cast in a single pour. Here these very elements come together in an imitation of the building of a structure, a parallel sculpture that celebrates process over result. Their shape and form has no natural purpose beyond that of making it easy for the liquid bronze to travel from one area to another and cast properly. The challenge was to make the assembly as large as possible without compromising on the single-pour rule. Their size is the upper limit that each particular foundry could handle without the delicate form breaking up during the mold making.
From the Shrinking and Disappearing Series, 2005-present.
The Shrinking and Disappearing series is an examination of the structure of making, especially of making sculpture and space. Often, as in Double Negative, the work utilizes a chosen form for a mold that with each successive sculpture deflates and evacuates itself like a paradoxically gravity-bound balloon. The formwork diminishes to a point of failure: eventually, it forms nothing. Sometimes the process eliminates the task of creation, concentrating instead on the processes involved, drawing attention both to the urge to make, to unmake, and to eliminate.
