Bharti Kher is one of the cleverest artists I have ever seen.  As a young artist just breaking into the Western market, she works primarily with the bindi-- the Indian forehead decoration traditionally donned by married women, and also Madonna in her more experimental moments.  Using only a multitude of these small half yin-yang shaped adornments, a canvas, and some glue, Kher made a pair of pieces called Spit and Swallow.  In the first work, a plethora of bindi's radiate out headfirst from a single point in the middle of the canvas.  Swallow also makes use of this halo effect, merely reversing the direction of the bindis so each looks as if it’s swimming to a single finite center.

But these lewd minimalist quips are not included in Kher's most recent Chelsea exhibition.  Her scale has grown, and she has added another dimension to much of her production.  This show, for instance, features a life-size elephant resting on the gallery floor.  It is skillfully sculpted, and once again covered with bindis, this time grey, realist, and jewel like.  The piece is called The Skin Speaks a Language Not Its Own, suggesting like so many of Kher's works a meditation on the aesthetics of identity politics in an era where such quandaries are largely forgotten.  Yet while the provocation is more than skin-deep, the surface is sensuous to distraction.

- Sophia Powers

(*Images, from top to bottom:  Bharti Kher, An Absence of Assignable Cause, November 15 - December 22, 2007; Jack Shainman Gallery, Installation View, 2007, Courtesy of Jack Shainman Gallery.  Bharti Kher, An Absence of Assignable Cause, November 15 - December 22, 2007; Jack Shainman Gallery, Installation View, 2007, Courtesy of Jack Shainman Gallery.)