Ruhee Maknojia: Ornamental Drift

Exhibition Dates: 

February 26 - April 25, 2026

Opening Reception: 

Thursday, February 26, 2026, 5 - 8 pm

Los Angeles Art Week Hours: 

Friday, February 27 - Sunday, March 1: 12 - 6 pm

839 is pleased to present Ornamental Drift, the Los Angeles debut solo exhibition by Houston-based artist Ruhee Maknojia. The show brings together new and recent paintings that address the transmission of pattern, culture, and material history across time and geography. Working on wood panel, stretched canvas, and canvas board, and incorporating hand-painted interventions directly on the gallery walls, the artist presents several interrelated series that appear in pairs or mirrored variations throughout the space.

Maknojia’s work grapples with questions of hybridity and cultural inheritance. Recurring motifs like the mojari, a handcrafted shoe traditionally worn in India and Pakistan, recognizable by its pointed, curled-up toe, appear as charged symbols negotiating tradition, and adaptation. In this regard, her approach aligns with artists such as Shahzia Sikander and Etel Adnan, whose work mobilizes pattern, myth, and abstraction as flexible systems rather than fixed cultural codes. Maknojia incorporates global visual languages intersecting with the textures of a more quotidian, American  consumer culture and a speculative imaginary in which pattern operates structurally rather than illustratively.

In Starcrossed (2025), two stylized human figures, joined at the torso, stand on a flattened, graphic landscape. Their arms and legs intertwine, while the specific geometric patterns of their garments both clash and harmonize. One dons the head of an indeterminate animal, whose elongated tongue arcs loosely against a warm orange field. Elsewhere in the composition, a cerulean circle edged in white punctuates the sky, a woodgrain- patterned rectangle peeks into the frame, and an old television set with two protruding antennas rests on the ground below. Extending Makonjia's Magicalscapes series, begun in 2023, the painting shows mythological figures unmoored from fixed origins. Drawing on the Laila-Majnun tradition (an epic narrative  of tragic love from Arabia that predates Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet by centuries) Maknojia considers how stories mutate and lose their claim to singular authorship.

The exhibition also includes works from the artist’s Paisley series, in which she hand-paints intricate brown paisley patterns across large-scale surfaces, interrupted by solid geometric forms such as acute triangles and square frames. Working entirely from memory, the artist recognizes paisley as a motif without a specific point of origin; one that has traveled across regions and decades, appearing in South Asian textiles, American psychedelic imagery, and the everyday vernacular of Texas ranch culture, as seen in the iconic, ubiquitous red bandanas worn across the region. For Maknojia, paisley functions as a foundational visual language: ornamental, unstable, and continually reshaped by shifting cultural lenses. Across the exhibition, patterns, including paisley, zebra, and others, surface as references to notions of protection, exoticism, and the fraught history of animal imagery within human adornment. These motifs accumulate to convey the weight of inherited forms and the ways in which images can migrate and resist fixed meaning. 

In Kitchen (2025), Maknojia introduces a different register. A white rectangular ground is overlaid with a gray grid establishing a system of order. A thick, angular brown line zigzags diagonally, at one point enclosing a blue-and-white circular form. A single painted leg enters from the upper edge, clad in gray patterned pants and a green jutti, hovering above a pale gray disc, while scattered red and yellow geometric blocks punctuate the surface. The painting’s flatness, controlled palette, and absence of shadow create a world governed by structure rather than depth; suggesting a domestic or architectural logic that is in tension with the more mythic works elsewhere in the exhibition. Together, these paintings trace how stories and motifs persist through continual reimagination.

Ruhee Maknojia (b. 1993, Houston) is a painter, animator, and installation artist based in Houston. Her work explores how literature, philosophy, history, and legal systems undergo fragmentation when transferred across new frameworks. She earned her MFA in Visual Arts from Columbia University in 2019. She has been an Artist-in-Residence and visiting faculty at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, is Dean at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and is Arts & Culture Lead for the Ismaili Center, Houston. She has exhibited at institutions and galleries including the Lenfest Center for the Arts (New York), Subliminal Projects (Los Angeles), LeRoy Neiman Center for the Arts (New York), and Rice University Moody Center for the Arts, Asia Society Texas, and Anya Tish Gallery (all Houston). In March 2026, Maknojia will open a solo exhibition of a related conceptual throughline at Women & Their Work in Austin. She also runs Sabian Press, an independent publishing project focused on contemporary artist monographs.

For images and inquiries: info@839gallery.com

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@839gallery

839 N. Cherokee Ave
Los Angeles, CA 90038

Open Saturdays, 12-6 pm, and by appointment

Accessibility and Parking: For the opening reception, we recommend public transit or parking in front of Bancroft Middle School on Las Palmas Ave., a short walk from the gallery. Please note that the gallery has a porch with four steps.