After gaining prominence in the international art scene with her recent solo and group exhibitions, Huma Bhabha has graced New York this month with a trio of installations at three separate venues. Uptown at Salon 94, she displays two deific totems on an abstracted landscape, evoking a dystopian Giza Plateau. Her sarcophagus figure — half Templar knight, half Ganesha — joins other corporeal forms at edgy Salon 94 Freemans downtown, and in a recent show at Chelsea's ATM Gallery, Bhabha exhibited romantic photographs of sculptural works in situ. Simultaneously futuristic and archaic, Bhabha renders her gods with less-than-heroic, humble materials in states of partial decay.

Educated at RISD and Columbia University, Bhabha has developed a sculptural approach that sweeps from pre- to postmodernism. Her manipulation of clay surfaces is reminiscent of Auguste Rodin's, and she borrows the totemic forms of Alberto Giacometti and Jacques Lipchitz, but questions their naïve primitivism. From Constantin Brancusi, she learns to integrate the figure and the plinth, and she sees the potential of photographic reproductions of sculpture in Robert Smithson's work. As a Karachi, Pakistan-born woman, Bhabha finds her work persistently reduced to commentary about Middle Eastern conflict or the condition of women in Muslim societies. While her installations touch on these issues, a more complex consideration reveals her to be a modern-day bricoleur — intermixing materials, methods, and references to create new mythologies.

-NB