Contemporary Art

<em>Chairs, Dayanita Singh: Chair Portraits</em>, (gallery installation), 2005. Photo: Clements/Howcroft, Boston.
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  • <em>Chairs, Dayanita Singh: Chair Portraits</em>, (gallery installation), 2005. Photo: Clements/Howcroft, Boston.
  • <em>Chairs, Dayanita Singh: Chair Portraits</em>, (gallery installation), 2005. Photo: Clements/Howcroft, Boston.
  • <em>Chairs, Dayanita Singh: Chair Portraits</em>, (gallery installation), 2005. Photo: Clements/Howcroft, Boston.
  • Fausto Calderai and Dayanita Singh discuss a gilded chair in the Titian Room, 2003.
  • Dayanita Singh, <em>Titian Room, Boston</em>, 2002.
  • Dayanita Singh, <em>The MacKnight Room Chair, Boston</em>, 2002.
  • Dayanita Singh, <em>Raphael Room Chair, Boston</em>, 2002.
  • Dayanita Singh, <em>Gothic Room Chair, Boston</em>, 2002.
  • Dayanita Singh, <em>Florence and Coimbatore Diaries</em>, 2004/2005. Installation in the Long Gallery. Photo: Thomas Lingner.
  • Andrea Anastasio and Dayanita Singh, <em>Amnesia</em>, 2005. Video loop projection of Dayanita Sing’s Chair Portraits on a chair from the collection. Photo: Clements/Howcroft Boston.
  • Dayanita Singh and Fausto Calderai, <em>An Arrangement of Blue Chairs</em>, 2005. Little Salon, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Photo: Thomas Lingner.
  • <em>Installation of Conversations</em>, video by Michael Sheridan, 2005.
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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 represented 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 body of work, Chair Portraits. The illustrative and evocative information in these photographs generate an energy with quasi-magical properties that speak to absence.

In the spring of 2003 Singh traveled to Florence with Pieranna Cavalchini, curator of contemporary art at the Gardner Museum, to meet with furniture scholar Fausto Calderai. He introduced her to various houses in the city, including his own, so she could photograph interiors that contained examples of unusual furniture. Singh spent an entire day in Calderai’s apartment, “conversing with his chairs,” as she puts it. She moved from room to room, photographing as the light changed. From the resulting contact sheets, she compiled a small artist’s book as a gift to Calderai; this book is now on view in the Long Gallery alongside a book on Coimbatore, where she traveled with designer Andrea Anastasio in the winter of 2003 — the Florence and Coimbatore Diaries.

To create the Chairs exhibition Singh continued her dialogue with Calderai at the museum. They planned an evocative rearrangement of furniture in the Little Salon to reinforce the strong sense of individuality many chairs possess. In An Arrangement of Blue Chairs, the furniture is positioned as for an imaginary family gathering, conveying the moods and personalities of the room’s absent occupants.

Meanwhile the feelings and thoughts triggered by the viewing of Singh’s little books generated another series of narrations resulting in Amnesia. Here Anastasio engaged in an intimate dialogue with Singh’s photographs projecting them on a chair from the museum’s collection.

All photographs, installations and conversations in the Chairs exhibition were a blend of understanding and wondering. As these threads were woven together, the process was documented by filmmaker Michael Sheridan in Conversations. Opportunities for the public to discuss the Chairs exhibition and to explore other chairs in the museum’s collection will be offered in March by Carla Hartman, the Gardner’s first museum Educator-in-Residence.

In the solitude of the museum’s carriage house Singh made her first artist book for a writer friend. At the time of this exhibition she had made thirteen such books each one created for a specific person: a private exhibition for one individual. In lieu of an exhibition catalogue Singh decided to print an artist book in this unique intimate format. One thousand books were printed: five hundred for sale at the museum and five hundred to be privately distributed by friends of the artist.