Gallery Wendi Norris

“I am trying to do this really basic job of a painter, which is to make images that express something about the present.” — Ranu Mukherjee While many of us have been wondering what to do, Ranu Mukherjee has been very busy in 2020. She has been painting and studying and painting and listening and painting and writing and painting some more. This series of mixed media paintings is a result of all that work, and it represents the full constellation of Ranu’s concerns: ecology, motherhood, and biodiversity; the human body and labor; modernity, climate change, and sacred cultures; the impoverishment of the imagination and the promise of unimagined utopias; feminist futurism and the strength of listening.

Gallery Wendi Norris presents Say My Name, a solo exhibition of new collage works by Ambreen Butt. Say My Name is Butt’s first exhibition with Gallery Wendi Norris and her first in San Francisco. Created as a means to explore the relationship between power and vulnerability and to pay homage to innocent lives lost, each of the twelve pieces in Say My Name incorporates the name and age of a single Afghan or Pakistani child killed in U.S. drone strikes. Butt commences by staining the paper in tea. She then separately and repeatedly writes or prints out the child’s name, shreds it into pieces, and arranges and glues the shredded fragments to her tea-stained paper in dense, swirling patterns. This process, undertaken with repetitive and transformational urgency, reconsiders the ripping, tearing action of a drone strike in order to elevate the names of its victims into shapes of exquisite grace and enduring strength.