Vijay Masharani
The Cure
September 27 - November 8, 2025
Veronica is pleased to present The Cure, a solo exhibition of new work by Vijay Masharani. This exhibition is curated by Zoey Lubitz.
The Cure is an exhibition of new drawings, sculptures, and a video by Vijay Masharani.
A small bird enters and exits the placid, wooded frame of the picture window in a blur. Each time it strikes the glass of a window. It makes a loud, tinny thud, and we look up as it forcefully collides with the translucent barrier it does not perceive. It does it again, rhythmically, unnervingly.
In this video, titled Tapper (2025), the artist used the consumer audio editing software Ableton Live to almost imperceptibly quantize the sound of the bird’s collisions, also adjusting the video footage in sync. In audio editing, quantizing refers to the process of modifying a given recording so that sounds in a sequence conform to regular time intervals, whether quarter notes, eighth notes, or another demarcation of time. The duration between each sound is reduced or expanded to accommodate these changes.
The use of the term “quantization” today to refer to the digital correction of imprecise sonic timing reflects a broader concept of quantization as the transformation of raw, time-based signals into consistent and exact intervals. Put another way, the very process of analog-to-digital translation of sound—the definition of digital audio—is quantization. In Tapper, Masharani not only adjusted the irregular timing of the bird’s percussion, but he also reduced other sounds in the footage. Claude Shannon, who imagined binary digital means for communication in the early 20th century, prioritized the “discrete noiseless channel.” In effect, auditory media should eliminate material not of consequence to the intended message.
The gesture of quantizing the little bird’s unceasing durational pathos points to recording as a disciplinary modification, and a means of keeping time. The drawings and blocks are also inflected by this metronome. Masharani recorded this footage from his bedroom in his parents’ home in Belmont, California. The house, just outside the crop of the video’s frame, is where he has lived, passed time, and worked for the past 18 months. It is where he produced the works presented in this exhibition.
Masharani initially began using the ubiquitous small wooden pattern tiles that comprise the sculptural works in this exhibition as DIY motion trackers for his video practice. Over time, he began to make sculptures with this set of six discrete colored geometric shapes. It seems hard to resist their tactility. Their simplicity is also their availability for reconfiguration. His compositions are proximate to the tiles’ intended usage when developed in the 1960s for US math pedagogy (although part of a longer lineage of pedagogical blocks dating back to Froebel and others). They recall a longer history of intimacy between modernist pedagogical experimentation and the avant-garde’s multifarious tendencies towards abstraction. In certain sculptures, grammars of symmetry, pattern, and variations seem operative, while others seem more discernible as symbols, ideographs, or drawings. Masharani mishandles the modular tiles, preserving and fixing them with ad hoc paper backing, and carving away their painted surfaces. He adds scribbles, notations, and marks.
The drawings, two diptychs, are also an evolution of the artist’s continuing experimentation with geometry. He begins by composing shapes in CAD software. Like the pedagogical origins of the colored tiles, his drawings reference coloring books. These drawings, departing from the emphasis on contour defining his previous works on paper, are the result of laying down fields of color and value, with bursts of images and forms that transit depth, and windows of translucency that muddy and fade the certainty of line. They contain affixed pieces of other drawings, sometimes years old, integrating work from a previous time into the drawing’s present.
Masharani’s work implicates larger systems and infrastructures of representation and mediation, while always returning us to his artistic process. Drawing always seems to refer back to its making, to the hand that drafts and erases on the table top. The Cure oscillates between rules (and their games) or disciplinary procedures—like metronomes and simple shapes—and the overwhelming, sensual layering of experience as it is made material through the artist’s process. Time passes slowly as we look for the imperceptible shifts that take us from resolution to dissolution of shapes and certainty. In a video work, Knox (Fog, Eucalyptus, Methotrexate) from 2024, Masharani’s frame moves between his reflection, the exterior of the room he is in, and, instructively, on the green light of an infusion pump, anticipating his bird in Tapper, on life as it is in the present, through a window, a mechanical heartbeat, in a continuous marking of time’s passage.
– Zoey Lubitz
Vijay Masharani (b. 1995, Bay Area, CA) is an artist and writer. He received his MA in Race, Ethnicity, and Postcolonial Studies from University College London in 2022 and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2023. He had his first institutional solo exhibition, Big Casino at Kunsthalle Zürich, in early 2025. His writing has appeared in artforum, Parapraxis, e-flux, BOMB, Momus, X—TRA, and elsewhere. He is represented by Clima, Milan.
Zoey Lubitz (b. 1991, Portland, OR) is a curator, writer, and educator based in New York City. She is currently a PhD student in Media, Culture, and Communication at NYU, and co-director of the Center for Experimental Lectures with Gordon Hall.
Gallery hours: Saturdays 2-5 pm
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This project is supported by the Seattle Office of Arts and Culture.