ART-PRESENTATION: Gauri Gill and Julia Phillips

MoMA PS1 is one of the oldest and largest nonprofit Contemporary Art Institutions in the U.S.A. Two new exhibitions are on presentation at MoMA PS1. In Museum’s series of exhibitions “Project” is on presentation the US premier of Gauri Gill’s most recent body of work “Acts of Appearance”, also on presentation is “Failure Detection” the first solo museum exhibition of Julia Phillips.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: MoMA Archive

Gauri Gill’s “Acts of Appearance”, is a series of vivid color photographs for which the artist worked closely with members of an Adivasi community in Jawhar district, Maharashtra, India. Renowned for their papier-mâché objects, including traditional sacred masks, Gill’s collaborator-subjects wear masks made to represent living individuals as they engage in everyday village activities. A confluence of scenarios and narratives, situated across “reality” and dreamlike states, come together in the photographs, which at once portray the familiar experiences of community members as well as symbolic or playful representations against the backdrop of their home and culture. Acts of Appearance is presented alongside a selection of Gill’s older photographs from the series Notes from the Desert, reflecting upon the echoes between works made over several years in different locations across India, and emphasizing her sustained engagement with rural communities and local artists. Gauri Gill’s complex practice contains several lines of pursuit, including a more than decade-long study of marginalized communities in rural Rajastan that resulted in several bodies of work. She has explored human displacement and the immigrant experiences highlight her sustained belief in collaboration and ‘active listening’, and in using photography as a memory practice. “Failure Detection” is the title of Julia Phillips’ first solo museum exhibition, featuring six newly commissioned major works alongside existing sculptures. The exhibition’s title provides a narrative framework within which Phillips’s works can be seen as tools for identifying, removing, penetrating, and preventing perceived glitches. A newly produced work, “Drainer” (2018), suggests a process in which matter could be extracted from a suspended ceramic cast of an abdomen and passed through a drain below. As in her other works, Phillips reveals the body in fragments, mapping internal functions to spatial configurations through partial body casts and support structures. In addition to “Drainer”, the exhibition includes four new sculptures, a series of ink prints, and a recently completed video. In each work, the body is a vessel for moving through psychological and social spaces. Primarily working with ceramics, Phillips creates objects and scenes that are intimately connected to the body. Her sculptures mostly avoid direct figuration, instead proposing various support structures for the body and emphasizing its absence. Impressions of the human form are visible through casts of orifices, handprints, and other corporeal traces. While suggestive of particular functions and purposes that are overtly physical, these works also produce social and psychological resonances. For Phillips, the body is entangled in both the real and abstract spaces of politics, made evident through indications given in her arrangements as well as the works’ titles, which are often directives for specific actions.

Info: MoMA PS1, 22-25 Jackson Ave, Queens, New York, Duration 15/4-3/9/18, Days & Hours: Mon & Thu-Sun 12:00-18:00, www.moma.org