IMAGES

Top: Dayanita Singh, Ballerina Chair, Poona, India, 2002

Bottom: Dayanita Singh, Asiatic Reading Room, Bombay, 2000

Chairs
February 11–May 8 2005

Dayanita Singh, Artist-in-Residence
in conversation with
 
Fausto Calderai, furniture scholar
Andrea Anastasio, designer
Carla Hartman, educator
Michael Sheridan, filmmaker
 
and the collection and curators of the Gardner Museum

A COLLABORATIVE EXHIBITION IN FIVE PARTS The Chairs project represents an artist’s journey over three years and three continents, culminating at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum — where part of the story also began. Dayanita Singh came to the Gardner Museum in the summer of 2002 as an Artist-in-Residence. The week before her arrival she had been photographing furniture and empty rooms in Calcutta, at the houses of families of whom she had made portraits. At the Gardner, Singh began to photograph objects in the collection, and found that she was drawn mainly to the chairs in the galleries — as though they were people she was portraying. This was the beginning of Singh’s latest body of work, Chair Portraits. The illustrative and evocative information in these photographs generate an energy with quasi-magical properties.

More on the Exhibition

EYE OF THE BEHOLDER LECTURE
Chairs: Standing between Sky and Earth
Andrea Anastasio, designer and Gardner Artist-in-Residence
Thursday, February 17, 6:30pm

CONVERSATION WITH THE ARTIST
Dayanita Singh, Artist-in-Residence
Pieranna Cavalchini, Curator of Contemporary Art
Saturday, February 12, 1:30pm

FAMILY WORKSHOP
Sitting Pretty
Saturday, March 19, 9:30am–12:30pm