Jagdeep Raina

A generous tactility informs work with diasporic traces of South Asia.

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An almost literal line weaves abstract traces of South Asian diaspora into everything left unsaid, a solo exhibition by Jagdeep Raina, born in Guelph, Ont., and now based in Houston. 

Raina’s mixed-media works on paper – figurative assemblages of paint, ink and collage – as well as muslin embroideries, drawings bound in quilts, and line animations, signal a modern and quotidian migratory flow focused on people, places and the elusive qualities of home. 

His works, on view at the Libby Leshgold Gallery in Vancouver until Feb. 26, point to an unsettled quality worn so closely against the skin we may take it for granted. Many pieces are landscapes, or perhaps more specifically, homescapes. These are sites that seem to reveal something uniquely intimate, perhaps about the artist, or simply the community he is drawing, through the quality of his mark making. The line might form an outstretched desire for a sense of home, point to an origin that has long since passed, or build a familiar family scene – and sometimes all three at once. 

Whether by stitch, paint or ink, Raina’s hand remains a tangible presence. The gallery opens with the 2017 mixed-media work, Tucked behind these doors I stand in the light of your histories. It shows a typical suburban scene – a split-level house with a Nissan Sentra in the driveway – and is executed in pencil crayon, oil pastel and paint punctuated by photocopied images of a couple at the front door. An immigration certificate in the window is defaced by a racial slur. 

Because drawing and textile work, perhaps more than other media, link the artist to the art through the physical gestures involved in its making, it’s easy to construe this as a deeply personal scene, carried through in careful handwritten text that appears, as if by surprise, in the car’s paint. Raina’s lines have a hasty quality, suggesting he begins with a large idea – the site of a memory, perhaps – and then populates it with details, such as text and collaged items, as his vision comes into focus.

Raina’s embroidered works on muslin are remarkable. These are roughly hewn pieces of fabric, covered, in most cases, edge to edge in silk embroidery floss. Here too, his stitching makes staccato-like tracks, and in the dense layering of colour and texture, it functions like graphite and ink, equally recording the artist’s motion to reveal a delicate record of his process. 

Sacred Ground, an embroidered piece from 2018, is a black-and-white construction of a Sikh temple. Abstract things like light and shadow, and concrete things, like the people who come to worship, are stitched in varying detail onto the building. The medium’s root in craft lends the temple a friendly warmth. It is a welcoming soft architecture. 

The politics of identity can sometimes interfere in the experience of an artwork – this is when an artist’s background appears to play too significant a role in understanding the art. It seems an artistic freedom to have one’s art read as separate from one’s biography. Certainly, in the 20th century, this was a privilege often bestowed on the white male artist-genius. Yet, in everything left unsaid, I found a pleasing connection between Raina and his works, conveyed through his gestural line. The trace of his hand is always there. This generous tactility connects art and artist with the viewer. ■

Jagdeep Raina: everything left unsaid, at the Libby Leshgold Gallery at the Emily Carr University of Art and Design in Vancouer from Jan. 13 to Feb. 26, 2023.

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Libby Leshgold Gallery (formerly Charles H. Scott Gallery)

520 East 1st Avenue, Vancouver, British Columbia V5T 0H2

604-844-3809

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