This marks the first time the “Art at Amtrak” series, which previously installed works in the Amtrak Rotunda and 8th Avenue Concourse, has put art in the Hilton Corridor. Observer spoke with Ganesh at the unveiling of the installation, which complements her other video work, Coherence, on view in Moynihan Train Hall through October 14.
Chitra, your video works incorporate many elements of your symbolic and visual language. The flora, along with specific plants and species, seems intentionally symbolic in the narrative you’ve created. For example, the Rose of Jericho and the Welwitschia plant of Southwest Africa symbolize resilience, while others are native to the NYC area. How would you describe the importance of plants in your narrative, and how do they serve as metaphors for broader societal phenomena throughout human history?
I use plants from many regions worldwide to underscore humanity’s consistent recognition and association of plants with healing, regeneration, growth, resilience and remembrance. It seems especially important to remember that we humans are in a symbiotic relationship with plants—as we live through an unprecedented moment of climatic destruction that endangers countless species worldwide to the point of extinction. Plants have forever been at the forefront of human consciousness as a metaphor for life cycles and a scale of life and time in nature that is much larger than we typically think daily.
I was also interested in how specific plant qualities are similarly recognized across cultures, sometimes having multiple and universal resonances. Two examples are the calla lily and the dandelion. Calla lilies originated in South Africa and then migrated around the world. In Greek and Roman symbology, their chalice-like shape represented rebirth and bounty. In Mexican culture, they have been associated with purity and rebirth, often seen in historical paintings depicting Easter. I was also inspired by Diego Rivera’s use of calla lilies in his large-scale murals and paintings, which symbolize rebirth and revolution, as the works between 1920 and 1940 were made during the Mexican revolutions.
Dandelions, to me as a New Yorker, are symbols of resilience, survival and thriving despite the harsh conditions of urban grit such as cement and asphalt. In Scandinavian culture, words in Norwegian and Swedish reference the strength of the dandelion. For example, ”maskrosbarn,” meaning “dandelion child,” refers to someone with a tough childhood and still turns out alright, like a dandelion breaking through asphalt. The Swedes have long spoken of “dandelion” children, namely “normal” or “healthy” children with “resilient” genes who can do pretty well almost anywhere, whether raised in the equivalent of a sidewalk crack or a well-tended garden, as explained in an article by the Atlantic.
As you shared in the press release accompanying this important project, your first encounter with art as a child was in an urbanscape. How do you feel this street language has influenced your artistic style, and how would you describe it today?
There are so many ways in which street art has profoundly impacted my work. My relationship with public transport is long and rich. I started riding the subway to school by myself when I was ten years old, in 5th grade. Before they came to New York, my parents were native residents of Calcutta, India, a vast and bustling city, and lifelong public transport lovers. My mother never got a driver’s license, and my father loved his Senior metro card so much that he continued to ride the Brooklyn buses until his death.
In many ways, street art, such as Keith Haring’s chalk drawings executed on stripped billboards in subway stations and tunnels or the graffiti-covered subway cars that were a hallmark of the 1970s and ’80s, was the very first site-specific art I ever saw. Long before I entered a museum, I was engaging with the vibrancy, maximal color and mark-making energy of such works, which were larger than life scale. They were a massive part of my gateway into incorporating graphic aesthetics and brief presentations of my work.
Public art has a unique and beautiful quality to it that has the potential to offer an even more profound and transcendent experience with visual art than one we might have in institutions such as museums or galleries. Seeing art in a museum or a gallery is more likely (though not always) a one-off experience—you go for a particular exhibition. Experiencing artwork in a place you frequent over and over, perhaps even several times a week or month, is an experience more akin to music. That is, you organically engage work through various moods and mindstates, and depending on your emotional weather, you receive different transmissions from the work and have a deeper relationship with it by being able to look and be with the art repeatedly. It becomes part of both your external and internal landscapes. That is a very profound element of public art that historically was much more aligned with how people experienced religious art in spaces they regularly visited.
As a budding artist in the early 1990s, I was deeply inspired by the works of New York-based artists such as Basquiat, Brazilian artists OSGEMEOS and West Coast artists such as Barry McGee and Margaret Kilgallen, all of whom developed a singular aesthetic that drew from graffiti and freight train hopping culture. I love art in airports, artwork in subways and chalk drawings done by my neighbors’ children on the sidewalks outside my apartment.
Most of your work features psychological and spiritual interplay between inner and outer dimensions, between the purely unconscious and a more senatorial world. How do you feel the video allowed you to explore these dimensions further?
Video and animation have been essential media for exploring the interplay between internal and external landscapes in the place where collective and individual or societal and psychic realities converge. Drawing-based animation offers astonishing potential for exploring the intersection of complex worlds. In Coherence, outlined silhouettes of figures are set against a lush landscape, and inside the bodies, we can witness an equally rich and contrasting landscape. In this sense, the bodies themselves become portals into another dimension. Portals have been an essential feature in my work as of late; they are a form that allows the compression of time and space, allowing audiences to traverse vastly different landscapes and temporal zones within the blink of an eye. They also allow us to see how multiple realities, mindstates or universes can coexist simultaneously. This idea of seeing many different landscapes or ways of being simultaneously seems crucial to me at this moment we inhabit—for example, where we are fed information through predetermined algorithms that limit and curate what knowledge we might access and where we are charged with the task of navigating a politically polarized and fraught climate. There are also multidirectional movements within each frame; for example, an expanding cosmos within the body while a unicorn gallops in the background or walking into a forest within the silhouette paired with flora and animals from a painted jungle scene.
The place where those videos are shown is a crossway where so many people from different backgrounds and with many other lives pass by. What narrative and experience did you want to conceive and deliver in this space?
I want to offer harried, preoccupied and anxious travelers a moment of respite that gives them some breathing room from the anxiety-driven process of running from A to B. Unfortunately, that is an ingrained part of the New York City commuters’ lives. Perhaps engaging with some moments of beauty and depictions of natural beauty—in worlds that exist both just outside and far beyond the confines of massive transport hubs like Penn Station—allows some breathing room and a reset that will bring some peace and pleasure into a charged, hectic and challenging space. This is through engaging with moments of respite, such as a figure gazing at hand, offering her a young olive plant, hands reaching for butterflies or a young girl scattering the seeds of a dandelion pod. In coherence, this pause or catching one’s breath becomes more literal as viewers are invited to be in synchronous relation with the figures on the screen.
The installation comprises two different chapters: Coherence and Regeneration. How do those differ or act as a continuation of the narrative?
Both invite the audience to consider a broader arc of time and an environment that can elicit beauty and joy, speaking to the capacity for resilience and survival despite threats of destruction. This feels like a powerful metaphor to access at a time on Earth when there is so much ongoing natural death and actions towards extinction via militarized violence, extractive fossil fuel processes and emissions in places all over the world, as well as right here at home.
Chitra Ganesh’s Regeneration is on view at New York’s Penn Station as part of the “Art at Amtrak” series curated by Debra Simon.
