Manish Nai intends for these aluminum poles wrapped in second hand clothing to tell formal aesthetic stories as well as family stories and stories related to the history of the clothing. Textiles are embedded with layers of myth and memory, including hints of the life of the people who once used them and echoes of the people who made them. Patterns, colors and textures speak to a time and place, while their manifestation within a garment speaks to a kind of person who would wear it. Nai's compressed clothing works might be seen as instigators of intergenerational conversations—timelines of family trees where a patterned shawl iconic to his grandmother's generation can be intertwined with a cartoon graphic t-shirt from his young son. Compressed into minimalist pillars reminiscent of architecture, these works also suggest Nai’s interest in the social structure of cross generational cohabitation, a practice common in India but often foreign to Westerners. Three, four, even five generations living in a single home is not uncommon in Mumbai, Nai has explained, and the mixing of their garments in laundry becomes a kind of intimate snapshot—a family photo in physical form.