Niyeti Chadha borrows visual cues from her immediate surroundings. The process  begins with her attention to mundane elements in her sight: a stack of bricks or a flowing gossamer fabric or the precisely sewn patches of a filled sail.  Her act of drawing disassembles and reduces a space into primal forms to understand their contribution to visually and architecturally making up the space we inhabit.

As the structure characteristics of the space are identified revealed the elements are then engaged in reconstructing a space redefined by the artist’s perception. Chadha’s drawing explores the way one’s eye deciphers the dimensions of physical spaces by reassembling most ordinary lines and shapes on a single plane. 

In the Queens Museum’s Unisphere Gallery second floor gallery, Chadha addressed two distinct spaces merely divided by the walls on which she created the site-specific drawing: the airy, light-filled orderly white cube gallery where the drawing is being executed; and the vast construction site on the other side of the wall, where the expansion project of the museum is currently in progress.  The elements borrowed from the other side, translated in innocuously simple graphics, laying down a blueprint that is half imaginary and half abstraction. 

Niyeti Chadha (b. 1979, Dehradun, India) earned her M. F. A. in Printmaking from University of Baroda, and a B.F.A. from College of Art, Chandigarh, India.  She has extensively exhibited in India and is a recipient of numerous scholarships and residencies including one in 2010 at  School of Visual Art, New York .