SAN FRANCISCO, CALIF.- 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, mimicking 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) interweaves a diverse range of visual languages including expressionism, comic and graphic arts, and South Asian figurative forms to create a unique visual grammar. The poetic text in Ganesh’s work draws from surrealist processes of automatic writing, offering polyvocal narratives that amplify the dreamlike and fantastical quality of works such as Her Garden (Charmed Tongue) (2006). The heroine of this work appears poised at a crossroads, contemplating the liminal space between creation and death, and posing alternative models of femininity and power to subvert conventional mythic and fairy tale storylines.
The suite of prints, Daughters of the East (2008), by Ambreen Butt (b. 1969, Lahore, Pakistan) is a poignant response to the tumultuous events surrounding the Lal Masjid (Red Mosque) clash in Islamabad in 2007. In this signature work of her oeuvre, Butt brings attention to the complexity of narratives surrounding the incident, particularly focusing on the involvement of young women protestors. Using images from the media, she highlights the role of mass media in shaping perceptions and narratives, underscoring the dichotomy between the visual allure of the images and the harsh realities depicted within them. The uneasy coexistence of empowerment and vulnerability here, creates a powerful intersection of beauty, violence, and empowerment that lingers with the viewer.
