‘Shivery Proof’: The art of Ranu Mukherjee

“There is cultural time and there is material time. The body connects to both.” 

The PCA&D Main Gallery will showcase the incredible artwork of San Francisco based Indian- American artist Ranu Mukherjee,   for its next exhibition, December 18, 2017 through February 9, 2018.

In Shivery Proof, viewers can enjoy Mukherjee’s hybrid films as well as her paintings and drawings. “Hybrid film” is a term Mukherjee coined for her moving image works made by animating layers of photographic, painted and digitally generated images.

Mukherjee creates video installations, drawings and paintings driven by her mixed heritage, vision of global citizenship and recent events related to climate change. Mukherjee uses forms of animism to address some of the most pressing issues of our time, questioning the norm while simultaneously imagining and creating alternate solutions.

• The exhibition opens December 18th and runs until February 9th.
• First Friday Opening Reception will be held January 5th, 5-8 p.m. and February 2nd, 5-8 p.m. in PCA&D’s Main Gallery, 204 North Prince Street, Lancaster, PA 17603, located on Lancaster’s Gallery Row. Admission is free.
• Mukherjee will present an Artist Talk on January 22nd, 10 a.m., in PCA&D’s Atrium. It is free and open to the public.

Art by Ranu Mukherjee.

Mukherjee creates video installations, bodies of drawing and painting and collaborative projects that have to date included choreography, pirate radio, procession, exhibition and book making.  She works with images as time based phenomena that unfold in the traffic between visionary and mediated perception.  In a process of making and unmaking, she uses fragments and layers to pry open a space between performance and representation, and to encourage active ways of seeing and being present.

Art by Ranu Mukherjee.

Mukherjee’s work is driven by her mixed heritage, dreams of global citizenship and uncanny sensations and events related to climate shift. In making it she places importance on destabilizing established origin stories, holding space for the unknown, negotiating continuous change, celebrating resilience and connecting with residual forms of animism as a means of imagining alternate futures. Her works embody the experience of colliding time frames marked in cultural, ecological and technological terms and the ongoing construction of culture through the forces of creolization, migration, ecology, speculative fiction and desire.

Mukherjee lives and works in San Francisco, California. She holds an MFA from Royal College of Art, London and a BFA  from Massachusetts College of Art, Boston.

Art by Ranu Mukherjee.

Her solo projects include Extracted, a three part exhibition at the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco (2016), Phantasmagoric, a three channel video work commissioned by the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art (2016), Phantasmagoria, Tarble Arts Center, Illinois (2017) and Telling Fortunes, San Jose Museum of Art, California(2012). and Shadowtime, her third solo exhibition at Gallery Wendi Norris (2017). Her work has been shown in many group exhibitions, including at Arizona State University Art Museum, Dana Galleries at Rutgers University, Gallery Espace, New Delhi, Vincent Price Museum, Los Angeles, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco and The San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery.

She is one of 36 international artists included in Sanctuary, a public project by For-site Foundation. Ranu is co-founder of 0rphan drift, a collaborative media artist which emerged in London in the 1990’s. Their work has recently been shown in Matter Fictions at the Berardo Museum, Lisbon, Unruly City at Dold Projects, Sankt Georgen, Germany and Eat Code and Die at Lomex Gallery, NY.

Mukherjee ‘s Artist Residencies include the Kala Art Institute Fellowship Program, Space 118 Mumbai and the De-Young Museum. Her work is in the collections of the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco, Robert D. Bielecki Foundation, NY, Kadist Foundation, NY and Paris, Oakland Museum of California and the San Jose Museum of Art.

Mukherjee is an Associate Professor in Graduate Fine Arts at the California College elf the Arts. She is represented by Gallery Wendi Norris, San Francisco.