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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Gauri Gill
The Americans
January 9 – February 7, 2009
January 2009 New York – Bose Pacia presents
Gauri Gill's photo-documentary project The Americans. The gallery is located at 508 West 26th Street on the 11th Floor, in the Chelsea district of New York City. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Friday from 11 to 6 and Saturday 12 to 6. The artist will be in attendance at the opening reception on Friday, January 9th from 6 to 8 pm. The public is invited.
Shot across the United States from 2000 to 2007, Gill's photographs document the Indian diaspora as it has settled across the country in rural areas, small towns and big cities, both retaining its traditional signifiers of Indian identity and merging within a larger American plurality. The resulting color photographs are simultaneously humorous, poignant, ironic, and beguiling. Gill's portrayal of her subjects and their lives emerges through her strict attention to detail and sympathetic juxtapositions.
Cultural theorist Gayatri Sinha positions The Americans within the framework of documentary photography and post-colonial discourse:
"Nearly five decades after [American photographer] Robert Frank, Gauri Gill takes a series of solitary journeys through America traveling extensively from New York and New Jersey to California to the Midwest and five Southern states. She moves outward, from the nucleus of family and friends to their networks, through a map lined with the material and psychological presence of migrants. The resultant body of photographs, "The Americans," emerges as a palimpsest that pays homage to Frank as much as it documents the new Americans – Indian immigrants. That Gill addresses her subjects with the transnational gaze of the traveling photographer brings her subject within the potent discourse of migration and diaspora, post-coloniality and the new world. Set in the chromatic intimacy of the candid photograph, it is inscribed by the material residue of two cultures, of the glittering flecks of Bollywood and Hollywood, the Indian and the American dream."
The series is currently touring internationally. It has been exhibited at Bose Pacia Kolkata; Nature Morte, New Delhi; Matthieu Foss Gallery, Mumbai; Thomas Welton Art Gallery, Stanford University ; Chicago Cultural Center, Chicago.
Born in Chandigarh, India, Gauri Gill received her first BFA in Applied Art(1992) from Delhi College of Art and her second BFA in Photography (1994) from Parsons School of Design in New York. In 2002 she received an MFA in Photography from Stanford University in California. Her works have been exhibited in New Delhi at Vadhera Art Gallery, Gallery Espace, Anant Art Gallery and the India International Centre. Most recently, in 2007 her photographs were included in group exhibitions at the both the Quai Branly Museum in Paris and the Newark Museum in New Jersey. Gauri Gill lives and works in New Delhi.