Finding art, six feet under

Who knew you could find smiles in a cemetery? Even scratched out, ragged smiles that can turn a place synonymous with suffering into one that brings new hope.

Los Angeles-based artist Neha Choksi attempts to represent the vibrancy of smiles in the starkness of a cemetery.

The title, If Nothing Else, Just a Smile, has been taken from one of Choksi’s earlier projects, which featured watercolours of the signs that homeless people use.

Her latest works centre around a cemetery, “an emotional place to which people always have some sort of response”. The beginning of life, according to her, was when you were an infant, and your mother smiled at you. That smile has been superimposed on the ending point of life, the cemetery. “A smiley is the universally understood symbol for happiness and joy. And if you
can’t have anything else in life, you always have a smile,” she says.  

“I do not look at cemeteries as dark places. They are inevitable resting places, an end point of life as we see it,” says Choksi. The cemetery that features in her works is the Inglewood Park Cemetery in Los Angeles, a place she regularly buys flowers from.
The photographs that make up a large chunk of Choksi’s work have been clicked in a single cemetery, and feature tombstones, old trees, hollow trunks and branches with budding flowers and leaves.

“The point of erasure is exactly where the drawing emerges,” says the artist. So, in most of the works, there are smiley faces scratched out over chopped tree limb nodes and stumps, a macabre way of memorialising absence. Two photographs — ‘You are always in my heart’ and ‘Remembering Mummy’ — have childlike human drawings scratched out on them, covering the tombstones instead of the trees. 

Choksi has always used different media in her works, and in If Nothing Else… she has made use of still images, sculptures and a video. The mattress sculptures are built on the idea of having a resting place, combined with one of Choksi’s favourite subjects — gravity. In bright colours like green and yellow, they are propped up by vases filled with fresh flowers.

The silent video ‘Sweetheart’, which gets its name from one of the tombstones, is about an old oak tree whose pruned section had a sprig coming out of it. “I thought it provides food for thought; the old and the new, the dead and the alive,” says Choksi, who prefers leaving her works open to interpretation.

‘If Nothing Else…’ is on display at Project 88, Colaba, till August 28. Contact: 2281 0066