MAPQUEST: new work in clay by Kanika Sircar presented by the Waverly Street Gallery.

November 8 – December 3, 2016
Reception: Friday, November 11, 6 – 9PM
Artist Q&A: Saturdays at 3PM
www.kanikasircar.wordpress.com

Kanika Sircar’s new ceramic work includes sculptural vessels and tiles. Her forms evoke books, pages or walls, and she marks their surfaces with ceramic pencils, slips and laser prints. Maps are central to her imagery, diagrams of both certainty and doubt. Maps point to where we think we are, and to the biases, dreams and fears underlying that assumption. In Starcharts, Sircar uses Schiaparelli’s drawings of the Martian landscape, including the winding grooves that, when translated into English as “canals”, sparked the hope of intelligent life elsewhere. The Galileo vessels are a nod to the long struggle to recognize a heliocentric universe. And in Borders, Sircar uses the declassified communiques that deal with the partition of the Indian subcontinent, the slashing red lines that she superimposes on maps alluding to the mere three weeks that it took Sir Cyril Radcliffe to arrive at the capricious boundaries of 1947.
Kanika Sircar lives and works in Washington, DC.