Laura McPhee “The Home and the World: a View of Calcutta”

Benrubi Gallery

poster for Laura McPhee “The Home and the World: a View of Calcutta”

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​Benrubi Gallery announces Laura McPhee’s The Home and the World: a View of Calcutta, the artist’s fifth solo show with the gallery, and her first since the gallery relocated to Chelsea in January of this year.

McPhee’s images are less an overview of this city of 15 million than a few frank glimpes into its complex, often conflicted soul. The frame is for the most part contained and classic. The smallness of the photographed spaces imparts a sense of intimacy even as the formality of the compositions renders them slightly aloof. This tension permeates the show: in the war of attrition between nature and the built environment (vines shrouding statues and columns, stones sieving rusty earth, clouds saturated with smoke and exhaust); in the eclectic mix of culture and class (Hindu and Moslem, Asian and European, palace and tenement, antique and modern); but above all in the hoard of color and display and the pervasive sense that so much attention to surface must be concealing something.

Elaborate Victorian and Mughal patterns, an end to themselves in other contexts, are here backdrops to the endless patterns-of-no-pattern arising from the recursive iteration of object and ornament—silks, flowers, paintings, tiles, or just trash—which call to mind both handicraft and factory. The effect, like the city itself, resists reduction, but insists on being experienced in its diversity. We associate the sublime with high art, but its origins lie not in temples and palaces but the hands that built them. We sense this in McPhee’s series of “Driveway Portraits” (so-called because they were taken at the gatepost of the house she lived in during her time in Kolkata). Here pass pedicab drivers, street entertainers, domestic servants, worshippers. They submit to a photograph, then move on; the resulting images are less portraits than still lives with human figures. The feeling is of something bigger than history or personality. We might call it the human condition, or civilization, but perhaps the most accurate name for it is simply time.

Media

Schedule

from October 29, 2015 to December 12, 2015

Opening Reception on 2015-10-29 from 18:00 to 20:00

Artist(s)

Laura McPhee

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