Broadway Billboard: Her Nuclear Waters

Her Nuclear Waters

May 12 – August 4, 2013
Opening Reception: May 12, 2013

Her Nuclear Waters by artist Chitra Ganesh, is the newest installment of the Park’s ongoing Broadway Billboard series, through which Socrates Sculpture Park commissions artists to create a billboard image that spans the main entrance of the park and offers a unique platform for exhibiting two-dimensional media. At least twice annually (spring and fall), Socrates installs a new work on the 11′ x 28′ billboard, which can be seen nearly a mile away on Broadway in Long Island City.

Chitra Ganesh’s drawing-based practice seeks to excavate buried narratives typically excluded from official canons of history, literature, and art. Her installation, text-based work, and collaborations dissect mythologies and layer disparate visual languages, inviting the viewer to consider alternate narratives of femininity, sexuality, and power as untold stories rise to the surface. Ganesh’s works harness a broad range of visual referents, drawing equally from German expressionism and Japanese woodblock prints, and contemporary visual idioms such as psychedelic print culture, anime, and comics. Her projects are also shaped via an engagement with literary narrative in its many forms:  folk and fairy tales, song lyrics, science fiction, and mythology. In this process, the figures is fractured, multiplied, obscured, and distorted, offering points of rupture as potent sites of social and sexual transgression, contemplation, and transformation.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Chitra Ganesh was born and raised in Brooklyn, NY, where she currently lives and works. Ganesh’s work has been exhibited widely at venues including the Brooklyn Museum, the Queens Museum of Art, the Asia Society, Bronx Museum of Art, Exit Art, White Columns, Momenta Art, and Apex Art in New York. International venues include the Gawngju Art Museum in Korea, Fondazione Sandretto in Italy, Nature Morte in New Dehli, Montehermoso Center in Spain, ZKM in Germany, and the Royal College of Art in London. Her works have been featured in several publications including the New York Times, Flash Art, Art Asia Pacific, and Time Out New York. Her work has been recognized with grants from the Astraea Foundation (2004), NY Community Trust (2006), New York Foundation for the Arts (2005, 2009), Printed Matter Inc. (2009), the Art Matters Foundation (2010), and the Joan Mitchell Foundation for Painters and Sculptors (2010). Residencies she has been awarded include the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Workspace Residency, Smack Mellon Studios, Headlands Center for the Arts, and the Brodsky Center for Innovative Editions.  Her work is represented in prominent international collections such as the Museum of Modern art, San Jose Museum of Art, Saatchi Collection (London), Devi Art Foundation (new Delhi), amongst others. Ganesh is the recipient of a 2012 John Simon Guggenheim memorial foundation Fellowship in the Creative Arts, with recent solo presentations at the Gothenburg Kunsthalle, PS 1/MOMA, and The Andy Warhol Museum.

SUPPORT

Broadway Billboard is supported through generous contributions from Agnes Gund, Charina Endowment Fund, Bloomberg Philanthropies, Mark di Suvero, and Lambent Foundation.

This exhibition is also supported, in part, by public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency, and by public funds from the City of New York Department of Cultural Affairs.