Ambreen Butt, Wife and Son of Badr Mansoor, 2019
Gallery Wendi Norris is pleased to present IN THE WINDOW: Wife and Son of Badr Mansoor, by Ambreen Butt, a site-specific commission for the gallery's San Francisco headquarters.
Wife and Son of Badr Mansoor transforms the gallery’s street-facing window into an intricate, illuminated collage. It is a large-scale expression of the methods and thematics Butt explores in "Say My Name,” a recent series of work in which each piece is created from and titled after the name of a child casualty of US drone strikes in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The artist works at an intimate scale in her studio (hand-staining, -ripping, and -pasting on paper); for IN THE WINDOW, she stretched and mounted two layers of vinyl from floor to ceiling over eighteen feet of glass. The result is a radiant composition of text fragments and color bursts that illuminate and hallow the memory of Badr Mansoor's wife and son while inviting the viewer to contemplate their tragic deaths.
Ambreen Butt (b. 1969, Lahore, Pakistan) lives and works in Southlake, Texas. Gallery Wendi Norris will present her debut solo exhibition in San Francisco in April 2020.