I recently visited 鶹ý Art Professor in his studio and found him at work on a new installation that will be presented in a group exhibition in New York City this June. The exhibition titled The Racial Imaginary Institute: On Whiteness is curated by former 鶹ý Professor Claudia Rankine. Mukherjee will be showing a work titled Writing on Tree Skin that reaches from the gallery floor to the ceiling about 22 feet up. He describes it as a column that will exist in the center of the gallery space so that viewers can walk around it and view it from all sides.
The column is light in weight as it consists of painted aluminum foil panels and will move as viewers come close to it and pass by it. The panels that are high relief forms, have been pressed against an old oak tree with his body giving the panels their form. Mukherjee refers to this as a “recorded dimensional encounter captured on a human sized aluminum sheet” that are then painted on both sides with spray bottles of pigment and chemicals. He says the “painting action mimics rain or mist” as the pigments fall onto the aluminum sheets and complete the tree skin. An eloquent description of his process follows: “Gravity, surface tension, evaporation speed and chemistry all play an important part in how the paint lands on the surface and moves across the dimensional surface creating images and patterns.”
The convex side of these skins are painted the colors of the earth, while the concave side takes on the color of skin and flesh. Mukherjee’s intention is for viewers to “experience them as uncanny aspects of flesh, skin, stone, leaf soil, as interwoven between the dimensions of material and historical reference”. He refers to this columnar work as a “hybrid skin that becomes an image of the nurturing and violent aspects of our relationship to ourselves and the nature we construct in the process” of experiencing these skins.