The Imaginations of Chitra Ganesh World
Over the past two decades, the Brooklyn-based Ganesh has built a conceptual lexicon from Indian myths, legends, and contemporary global-local narratives. She deliberately interchanges and/or combines formats of drawings, paintings, films, animations, comic books, etc. to animate the works. Any attempt to “root” the works would be futile as they ground and proliferate “rhizomatic-ally.”
One cannot use the term ‘etc.’ enough, or words like eclecticism, multiplicity, or plurality, while discussing the works of Chitra Ganesh, which are populated with a semiotic play of images and references.
One of the most challenging aspects of reading Chitra Ganesh’s works is to find a point of entry. The works address, include, vocalize, and represent a multiplicity of issues, narratives, stories, and events within the delineated visual space. From a distance, the works present immediately recognizable visuals and entities within the picture frame. The flora, fauna, landscapes, and people initially present themselves as familiar images. At the same time, the quasi-realistic, rather the surreal, is inescapable.
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As entities congruent and incongruent stand in conjunction and contradiction simultaneously populating the visual space. A woman, a tiger, a gigantic pigeon, roller-skates, shards of glass, embroidered embellishments, and colors – intense and muted, attest to the multiversal possibilities between the hypothetical and the real. Could they be merely simplified as metaphors?
Hence, here I attempt to find what can be called an “organizational rubric,” as stated by Gayatri Gopinath in her essay on Chitra Ganesh titled Feminist Genealogies, Utopian Visions, published in the monography on Ganesh by the art publisher Distanz, in 2024. The current show, Tiger in the Looking Glass, is her fifth solo at the Gallery Wendi Norris in San Francisco. It draws its source – organizational rubric, from the Barahmasa. The term Barahmasa, translated as twelve months, is originally a collection of poems from India that correlated the impact of changing seasons on the human psyche and emotional states – the collection dates between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
Central to this corpus of the Barahmasa is the portrayal of intense love – in togetherness and separation. Initially an oral tradition, the Barahmasa themes were deftly adapted by Indian miniature artists. Seasons and their transitions like blooming or withering flowers, landscapes lush or barren, cool or harsh winds, scorching heat, the cool moonlight nights, dark clouds, animals – ferocious and gentle, etc. contribute to the narration that builds a correlation to the human emotions, and hence the protagonists, the lovers.
Noteworthy is the detail that the nayika, or the female protagonist, is granted centrality in the literary and visual tradition of the Barahmasa. The twelve works by Ganesh in the show state not just the text’s enduring relevance in contemporary times but provide a reinterpretation. These works iterate Ganesh’s engagement with the feminist and Queer aesthetics. She plays the role of a storyteller akin to the poets of the Barahmasa and yet saturates the visuals with non-linear, tangled, yet unique narratives. Unlike the Barahmasa, which have a direct text-image correlation, the obscureness is foundational in Ganesh’s works, primarily through the semiotic play.
Ganesh’s female protagonists appear in and through many physical and emotional forms, from the supple, idealized body to the muscular, the candidly erotic to the shy, from indicated presence to the frontal confrontations. A delicate cropped face emerges from stylized vegetal forms, a fragile hand holds a flower in the darkness of the night, and a woman with her back to the viewers looks in what might be a mirror, presenting a reflection of a tiger’s face. A femme with a flower oddly perches on an oversized pigeon, possibly a mythical vehicle.
Mourning Dove could be an inverse, where a pigeon, perhaps a messenger, might have just landed on its owner’s bejeweled wrist, reminiscent of the virahani nayika, or the one who is separated/deserted from her lover and is suffering or longing for her beloved. One of the only images where the protagonist stares straight out of the picture frame is that of a hybrid body with a female’s body with a tiger’s head, Enter the Jungle, 2024. The Rousseau-esq forest forms the backdrop to this powerful hybrid figure. The tranquility of the trees and the birds, both forms and colors, ground the ferocity of the hybrid form.
Are these mere representations, pointers, or a lens to read out contemporary times? Are the women real characters or embodiments of characters, situations, and scenarios of live realities? In many ways, Ganesh presents the fantastical, the real, and the dream-like simultaneously for the viewers to explore.
Chitra Ganesh’s fifth solo show, Tiger in the Looking Glass, was held at Gallery Wendi Norris, San Francisco.
