Eva Schlegel, Multiple Voices (M9 scale model), 2023, brass, polished steel, printed acrylic glass, 16 x 11 1/2 x 7 1/4 inches (40.6 x 29.2 x 18.4 cm )
Multiple Voices
Ambreen Butt, María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Chitra Ganesh, Julio César Morales, Ranu Mukherjee, and Eva Schlegel
May 16–June 29, 2024
Gallery Wendi Norris presents Multiple Voices, a group exhibition exploring the idea of multiplicity, material, and metaphorical. Bringing together gallery artists Ambreen Butt, María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Chitra Ganesh, Julio César Morales, Ranu Mukherjee, and Eva Schlegel, the exhibition features artworks that are multiples, with the state of multiplicity embedded into their very fabrication. On a conceptual level, each of the artists exhibited plays with the relationship between the multiple and the multitudes in their artwork, seeking to amplify voices beyond their own. The prints, sculpture, video, and performance photography exhibited work together like a Greek chorus, uniting as a collective voice to speak truth and bear witness. Multiple Voices addresses the vital need for diverse points of view and redresses the implications of silencing. The polyphony of voices that ring out from the artworks speak to the viewer: we will be heard, we will be seen.
Taking its title from Eva Schlegel’s first public artwork in the United States, Multiple Voices (2023), the exhibition is anchored by the maquette for this polished steel and glass sculpture, whose mirrored surfaces create an architectonic space for reflection. In the titular work, Schlegel (b. 1960, Tyrol, Austria) incorporates lines of poetry from local poets into the panes of glass, blurring the script to limit legibility and incite the viewer’s curiosity.
Creating spaces for reflection and for ritual is central to the work of María Magdalena Campos-Pons (b. 1959, Matanzas, Cuba), which explores the role of memory, community, and ritual in shaping and transforming the present. Included in the exhibition is a portfolio of writing, poetry, and photography from her When We Gather film project, which has been screened over 200 times around the world. The project celebrates the women who have played a pivotal role in the progress of the United States and offers a call to create a path forward.
On view is the first ever print by Ranu Mukherjee (b. 1966, Boston), where she can enter into history on her own terms (2024). Mukherjee creates a background that is unique to each edition by printing abstract images of activist events onto sari fabric and catching the ink that bleeds through onto the paper. A field of objects – fruits, flowers, and birds, swathes of cloth, a megaphone, an ornate table – float atop the patterned ground, creating a dynamic still life imbued with symbolism and serving as an homage to international feminist movements.
The artwork of Julio César Morales (b. 1966, Tijuana, Mexico) addresses forms of migration and human trafficking. His film Boy in a Suitcase (2015) is inspired by an x-ray image taken of a young boy who was smuggled from the Ivory Coast to Spain inside a suitcase. The monitor playing the film sits on the floor and is exhibited with a mirror that reflects and refracts the film’s pixelated and pulsing images, micking the disorientation the young boy must have felt while tumbling in the suitcase on his harrowing journey. Morales’ own musical score adds to the anxious tension felt by the viewer.
The work of Chitra Ganesh (b. 1975, Brooklyn) also looks to current socio-political concerns, and imagines mythic analogues to contemporary issues. Ganesh’s images draw on a compendium of visual source material–from surrealism to Hindu and Buddhist iconography to comic books– to create works like Her Garden (2006), part of the rarely displayed Tales of Amnesia suite. In this suite, Ganesh’s first and most iconic, her central character explores alternative models of femininity and power, upending the status quo and the fairytale format.
Ambreen Butt (b. 1969, Lahore, Pakistan) uses the power of the female voice(s) to call attention to political injustice, injustice most often directed towards women and children. Butt’s print portfolio, Daughters of the East (2008), a signature work from her practice, draws from images and reports on the siege of Lal Masjid in Islamabad in 2007. The set of five prints are a reaction to contemporary political violence and seek to give voice and presence to those who were silenced and whose lives were lost.