By Ted Barrow
Because we encounter so much of our visual culture through increasingly hopeless digital images, we may assume that most art presumes a screen. In your hand or upon your lap, however, too many artworks suffer as the market crunches them into those digital formats best swiped online; neutral fluorescents beaming out from JPEGs, and what you see on the screen is often what you get in the gallery. Or rather, the paucity of experience online can poison a show. Three shows recently on view in San Francisco bucked against this trend by inviting viewers to move back and forth in front of the works on view. Digital photos do these artists no favors whatsoever.
Ranu Mukherjee’s “The Long Middle” at Gallery Wendi Norris, which recently closed, presented a body of deeply layered works that soak up multiple visual systems. Layers of inkjet-printed silk stretched across a ground of crystalina and pigment, over which Mukherjee built passages of paint. She pasted floating fragments of cotton jamdani, setting painterly exuberance against technological reproduction, a happenstance that overlaps into a frisky interplay. Mukherjee’s themes teeter between collective action and environmental catastrophe: the honeycombed pixel pattern printed on silk is based on images of crowd protest, while much of the flora and fauna Mukherjee lusciously paints are endangered, or invasive, or gone.
In if I could describe my river (2026), extinct birds commingle with portraits of cats Mukherjee met on her travels, all looming like the creatures above the artist in Goya's Sleep of Reason (1797-98, published 1799), springing from a plastic water bottle. Too visually complex to be winnowed down to pat messaging, works such as rare earth dream (2026) present the motif of the window frame, which recurs both as illusionistic conceit, something we look through, and as flatbed pattern, something we gaze at. The unresolved contrast between these modes constitutes the work's haunting power: medium and message may be inextricable, but their connection need not be resolved. Let’s float rapt in the harmony of diaphanous color, whether we understand it or not.
