IN HER SPRAWLING installations in the last decade, Rina Banerjee has tended to amalgamate a vast variety of things. I'll Get You My Pretty, a commissioned installation for a group exhibition of nine artists at SITE Santa Fe, in the state of New Mexico in the U.S.A., from the 13th of February to the 10th of May, was no exception. It included, but was not limited to, the following: a very large onionshaped dome covered in panels of green and gold sari cloth and topped with white feather fans.

Under the dome dangled numerous white lights. The dome, in turn, hung over a unique hybrid creature about three feet long, which levitated a foot or so off the ground and was parallel to it. The creature's head was made of a cow skull with a bundle of long white sticks that protruded menacingly outward from its snout. The body of the creature, covered in wild turquoise silk brocade, terminated in a reptilian tail corseted in a magenta crocheted lace. This bizarre and sinister creature seemed to fly across the world, since on the floor beneath it, extending nearly 20 feet in diameter, was a map of the world laid out in yellow cowrie shells, white sand and sparkling grey mica, with tiny metal soldiers and smooth pebbles forming twisting paths across it. Old empty glass tonic bottles clustered on the northeast coast of the United States and tiny glass medicine vials spelt out the compass rose. At the far western edge of the map stood two plastic camels, possibly AWOL from Christmas nativity scene duty, dripping with décor and capped with magenta feathers, and attached with colorful lariats to the hovering creature.

In short, the installation was quite a sight. Bizarre, gaudy, sinister in a darkened room, over-saturated with potential narratives, highly specific,weirdly gleeful and mysterious. Like much of Banerjee's work - since she abandoned science for art in the early 1990s - it revealed her fearless curiosity about the narrative potential of materials, from the kitschy to the sublime.

Banerjee, who was born in Calcutta but came to New York as a child, completed a Bachelor's degree in Polymer Engineering at Case Western University in 1993 and took a job as a polymer chemist at Pennsylvania State University. She explained her brief career in science to a New York Times reporter for a 2006 article: "I'm Indian, and that's what Indians do." But art prevailed over the program of "doing what Indians do" and she abandoned science for it. She completed an MFA at the Yale University School of Art in 1995, where she won a prestigious award for drawing. Like many U.S.-based artists, Banerjee came to prominence through her inclusion in the Whitney Biennial - this happened in 2001. Since then, she has held many solo shows and her work has been included in group exhibitions around the world, often - but not always - in contexts that have foregrounded questions of identity and otherness.

Although critics frequently seek the influence of her scientific background in her work, what is, perhaps, more interesting is the reason she became a chemist in the first place: because she is an Indian. Banerjee seems to delight in complicating her membership in the Indian Diaspora when speaking to the press. In a 2007 article by Yannis Tsitsovits in Juxtapoz Art & Culture Magazine, for example, she said: "I don't know what Indian is, really; I know I am it." Further on in the same article, she stressed, "It's very important to be aware that you can never completely know a place you're not explicitly part of. I'm very aware of that because when I visit India it's very clear that I'm not part of it." She is an Indian who does what Indians do (but not for long), who knows that she is Indian (but doesn't know what an Indian is), who is aware that she is "not part" of India and can never completely know it.

Although Banerjee's educational background in polymer engineering crops up in subtle ways, for example, in her understanding of how to build things from the many types of plastic she employs, it is her position as Indian/not Indian, her joyful embrace of the teeming superabundance of India that translates into her work in a freehanded (and often devious) use of culturally specific materials. Her sources are cheap Canal Street toyshops, jumbled tourist emporia with Mexican/ Made in China items, fossils, feathers, and oddities of the natural world. No object escapes her voracious eye; all come from a level playing field; all reflect the strange understanding that one culture has of another (particularly that the West has of the East); all can be sprinkled with sparkling mica and rendered into fairytale. "The way I see it, there is no such thing as authenticity. So much of the goods we see in the world are a product of tourism and commerce that it's almost a Catch-22 situation, where if it's visible to you it's probably not real and the people you think it represents don't even see it. It's almost like two worlds living within each other." Banerjee excels at inserting worlds within worlds like so many Russian nesting dolls, as we saw in her installation at SITE Santa Fe.

Unlike much of Banerjee's work, this cacophonous creation had a title that offered a clear point of entry into it: I'll Get You My Pretty was the phrase uttered by the Wicked Witch of the West to the innocent Dorothy in the 1939 classic movie The Wizard of Oz. (Typically, Banerjee's titles are hundreds of words long and seem to be crafted with the same horror vacui that the works themselves carry. They are the bane of curators everywhere.) Given that the apparent protagonist of this installation, the cow-skull creature, was flying over the landscape, and that the title directed us to the mythical landscape of Oz, we can surmise that Banerjee's creature must have been a reference to the flying monkeys of the Hollywood surrealist epic.

Furthermore, given that Banerjee's installations typically layer Indian influences over Western ones, and that one flying monkey leads to another, this creature could have also been Hanuman, the famous flying monkey god of that other proto-surrealist epic,the Mahabharata. The second part of the epic, in particular, resembles The Wizard of Oz, in that it is also a story of exile. In one, the innocent, pretty Dorothy travels in a tornado to a dreamland, to seek out the wizard who can send her home again, and loses her innocence as she does so. The Mahabharata is not so easily synopsized, as it claims: "What is found here, may be found elsewhere. What is not found here, will not be found elsewhere." But it, too, contains stories of exile and loss of innocence.