Illuminating the wall of the gallery area, Siona Benjamin’s framed and curtained lightbox, Pantomime in Pardes, recasts characters that appear in her paintings in reference to the traditional 19th-century popular theatrical genre performed around the holiday season. Pardes means “garden” in Hebrew, or “secret orchard,” and also "foreign land" in Urdu and Hindi. As guest appearances in the pantomime tradition were standard, the artist inserts her great-great-grandfather among the masses of blindfolded figures created in her own self image. Benjamin’s synthesis of various ancient and popular styles, from Indian and Persian miniature paintings to Bollywood billboards and Amar Chitra Katha comic books on pop-Indian mythology reflects not only her bicultural Jewish and Hindu/Muslim background, but also her attempts to recover the fragmented narrative of an identity neither fully in the past nor the present, a consequential product of her personal encounters with loss and liberation, resulting from immigration, motherhood, and the social conflicts of war. www.artsiona.com