San Francisco – Gallery Wendi Norris is pleased to present Shadowtime, the third solo exhibition with San Francisco-based, multi-media artist Ranu Mukherjee. Shadowtime unveils a series of new yellow, orange, and purple pigment and milk-paint paintings on paper and a hybrid film installation, projected on a 107 x 60 inch sculptural glass screen.
The paintings, varying in scale from intimate to larger-than-life, debut a new style of mark making for Mukherjee. The brightly colored and near-abstract compositions incorporate layers of gestural lines evoking immediacy and movement. At first glance, the paintings appear as collections of colorful fragments. Made up of seemingly knotted entanglements, they deny the viewer immediate comprehension of specific subject matter. However, from vibrant tangles and clusters, narrative and contradicting imagery unfolds. Scenes of lovers embracing, ice sheets cracking, and masses of people in protest or prayer reveal themselves with relatable complexity.
This exhibition will also introduce the artist’s newest hybrid film installation, Mixing Dusts. As artist-in-residence at the de Young Museum, Mukherjee recorded pairs of participants rolling on the ground while hugging. Footage of this intimate and difficult action is sequenced into a constructed space where the embracing bodies appear in motion on mutable and unsteady ground. Expressions of love are made incongruous by an underlying sense of apocalypse and uncertainty.
In 2015, Mukherjee collaborated with the Bureau of Linguistic Reality to coin the term, “Shadowtime”, meant to capture “the feeling of living simultaneously in two distinctly different time scales” or “the acute consciousness of the possibility that the near future will be drastically different than the present.” Since then it has added layers of resonance for her, particularly as a multi-racial artist in a precarious and divisive historical moment. “Shadowtime” becomes a noun about unknowing. It expresses the cognitive dissonance of equally possible yet divergent futures. Layering images of natural disasters and exodus, the artist personalizes incomprehensible fear with undeniable notions of hope and love.
This exhibition is complemented by a conversation between Mukherjee and distinguished curator Saisha Grayson, and a closing reception and special performance premiering Now not Now, a newly commissioned dance work by Hope Mohr Dance. Mohr's choreography responds to Mukherjee’s paintings and activates the gallery space with bodies in motion. In the dance, as in Mukherjee’s work, images emerge out of layers of line and gesture. The dancers explore irregular rhythms, surrender their weight to the ground, and embody tensions between performance and representation.
