New Viewings #18

Come Undone: Ranu Mukherjee and Suné Woods

This presentation of the viewing room places California-based artists Ranu Mukherjee and Suné Woods side by side to highlight how each artist employs collage and layering as a strategy. The aim is not necessarily to just build an image, but to reveal the fragmentation, even fracturing of the world, society, family, and our bodies and minds. Come Undone features artworks that subtly uncover some of our vulnerabilities –environmental catastrophes, lack of access to health care (and care more broadly), political division, and troubled histories– which continue to cut us up. Yet, Mukherjee and Woods also call up sensuality as a bodily reminder of our capacity to love, feel, and move forward. This strategy does not recuperate loss or put things back together, but it demonstrates the resilience and power needed to forge new paths forward.

The exhibition is anchored by two video works. Falling to get here (2017) by Suné Woods offers an investigation of intimacy through a compelling representation of the joy and pain of black relation; the political and economic pressure that renders such relation impossible; and the miracle of the persistence of such relation in the face of impossibility. Succession (2018) by Ranu Mukherjee, references the process of ecological succession, the regeneration of a habitat after a devastating event, in this case the California wildfires. As two dancers move through landscape of charred trees and soil, the viewer is placed within the catastrophe, literally and metaphorically, and has to reconcile that at this moment of crisis, that our health is inextricably tied to the health of the Earth. The shock of green grass provides some hope. While we may never become whole, perhaps we may be able to create some equilibrium and balance in order to heal and change.