Artists: Neha Choksi - Mahesh Baliga - Claire Baker - Goutam Ghosh - Tejal Shah - Trupti Patel

In their debut exhibition at No.9 Cork Street, Project 88 presents Treeish, a group show curated by Prajna Desai, featuring works by Claire Baker, Goutam Ghosh, Mahesh Baliga, Neha Choksi, Tejal Shah, and Trupti Patel.

Treeish, a poetic logic borrowing from the work of British tree scientist Harriet Rix, is about the
nature and evidence of arboreal power. Curated by Prajna Desai, and emerging from Never was a shade, exhibited concurrently at Project 88 in Mumbai, it also marks twenty years of the gallery’s ongoing commitment to art practices engrossed in the definitional complexity of nature and in the speculative. Trees being at large in the world they have created, us moving through, oblivious and observing, is what the exhibition leans into. To wonder chiefly at arboreal presence and indifference, at the persistence of trees regardless of us and what they are to us is hardly to downplay the environmental virtuosity that trees have always possessed. But cherishing trees chiefly as instruments of our survival circumvents their essential qualities: their tree-ishness. This existential process-achieved by evolutionary twists and hazards-has been shaping earth uniquely and phenomenally and, by that turn, its beauty and stupefying variety. Even our admiration for trees is a learned ability. Their forms have cultivated in us an aesthetic sense, a feel for beauty that attunes us to their extraordinariness as entities in themselves. Enjoying them inclines us to cherish them, a fecund yet neglected loop. Little wonder this hypothesis risks revisiting the obvious: “The greatest wisdom is understanding that appreciation and conservation are two sides of the same coin.” That trees by what they inherently are act upon and enlighten us—magnets of material, movement, and mind.

And so become the self-erasing trails of birds diving through trees in Claire Baker’s lashings of pigment, earth, and precious rock on aluminium. With finger paintings on glass, combined with video, Neha Choksi voids any question of tree as vessel to instead offer arbologues by vision and touch. The “whacked”, slab-formed ceramic trunk of Trupti Patel’s mango tree evokes the struggle to wrest human memory from arboreal time. Candour—or what a tree is—and metaphor—or what it resists—combine in Tejal Shah’s nature prints of Himalayan foliage. The touch and weave of trees throughout his painterly vision distill in Mahesh Baliga’s delicate tree exercises, to which Goutam Ghosh’s wry erasure of painting on cotton plays up the forest for the trees.