Works by Jonathan Robinson, Annette Barbier, Deb Ellis & Prajna Parasher, and David Rathod Jonathan Robinson in Person In the wake of British rule, India found itself exoticized in a stasis of alluring imagery. The almost transparent familiarity of these images has allowed their embedded ideology to linger. Clearing the senses of colonial representation, then, has posed a challenge for artists interested in the subcontinent. David Rathod's Come With Me, a music video made for Translator, takes the high road with a song about spiritual transcendence. Regardless, this well-intentioned work reproduces the glamor of difference in a lush montage of Hindu exotics. Half travel-journal, half feminist tract, Annette Barbier's Women's Movements relies on intentional amateurism and a delicate innocence. Like a bumbling tourist, Barbier meanders through Indian culture, her daughter in tow. What she attempts as she views woman-at-work is a benign interpretation of the cultural Other: the self-effacing observer. Deb Ellis and Prajna Parasher take a different tact: In Unbidden Voices, the plight of Indian women is explored. An older woman who has emigrated to the U.S. tells of her subservience on both sides of the globe. This testament is then met by clips from films and archival sources, illustrating authoritarian Raj-like culture. A third narrative, in the form of a post-Marxian text, enters, binding the discourse together. Ironically, the primary voice of the Other, the elderly woman, is subsumed by a dominant meta-critique: post-colonial colonialism at work. Jonathan Robinson's new work sight unseen anticipates many of the pitfalls of determined difference. Toying with the 19th century travelogue, Robinson examines the (dis)orientation experienced by a Westerner under the sway of the foreign. This beautiful montage of found images and film footage constructs a miasmic vision of colonized culture, using skewed systems of technology and time. sight unseen undermines colonial representation by looking at the observer, not the observed. --Steve Seid