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In her studio-based photographic practice, Anne Collier brings the objective approach of technical and advertising photography to emotional and psychological subject matter drawn from books, posters, or magazines. As Collier explains, for her the studio is “both a framing device and … a ‘stage’ for various kinds of photographic tableaux.” Many of her photographs are shot with a rostrum setup that allows her to capture static objects from above. The technical requirements of this process—to avoid distortion, the body of the camera and the object being photographed must be perfectly parallel—give her photographs an exaggerated sense of flatness.

The series Open Book presents photographic tableaux of anonymous hands holding open books of photographs against a white background. In Open Book #3 (Island Wilderness), endpapers show a serene ocean view, the image reminiscent of a stock photograph that might be used for calendars or postcards. The crease at the book’s spine and the volume of its underlying pages slightly misalign the seascape. Viewers are acutely aware of looking at an image of someone looking at an image. As Collier comments, “there is a kind of doubling at play, where the real subject of the work is the activity of looking.” Playfully voyeuristic, the photograph also highlights the unbridgeable distance created by representation.

Anne Collier’s Open Book #3 (Island Wilderness) introduces a new artist to the ICA/Boston collection and augments the museum’s strong photography holdings, joining works by artists such as Leslie Hewitt, Louise Lawler, Cindy Sherman, and Sara VanDerBeek who also use found and stock imagery in their work.

2016.11

From the outset of his career, Paul Chan has worked as both an artist and a political activist. Using diverse media—film, animation, design, and performance—Chan often grapples directly with political issues, from creating a guide that offers protesters ways to intervene in the 2004 Republican National Convention to staging a play with residents of New Orleans’s Ninth Ward following the devastation of Hurricane Katrina.

1st Light is the first of a seven-part cycle of animations in which Chan addresses the themes of religion, politics, and art. A shape-shifting parable of politics and religion in a post-9/11 world, Chan’s animation is both morally and aesthetically resonant. Drawn on a computer and projected on the gallery floor, the simple but dramatic silhouettes in the work describe an apocalyptic vision of the world. Shadowy bodies fall, earthly objects rise to the heavens, and the audience is confronted with the meaning of salvation and faith in an era dominated by war, consumerism, and terror. Chan was the fifth artist chosen for the ICA’s Momentum exhibition series, and 1st Light was featured centrally in his installation.

The first work by Chan to enter the ICA/Boston collection, 1st Light signals the museum’s commitment to support important artists at emerging points in their careers, and to build a collection that reflects the key issues, media, and forms of the twenty-first century.

2006.1

Ambreen Butt elaborates on traditional Persian miniature painting in works laced with both historical reference and contemporary resonance. Her intimately scaled imagery on overlaid sheets of stitched Mylar and paper presents open-ended narratives that are formally and conceptually layered. The works are organized in series that contextualize and expand on their themes.

Butt’s experience as a Pakistani Muslim in the United States has grounded her depictions of a heroine gracefully poised on the threshold of self-defining change. Loosely based on the nayika—a heroine who introduces the action in Persian paintings—the protagonist in the series Bed of My Own Making is herself the center of the action, both its cause and effect. Caught yet capable, she finds herself in a universal situation that Butt describes as being about “making choices and living with them for better or for worse.” In Untitled, a woman is caught mid-stride at the top of a hill while juggling balls and balancing a potted tree on her head. Through the mist of the Mylar surface and a matrix of dotted lines, we see that the surface ahead of her bare feet descends unevenly into uncertain territory. The dots condense around her, and it seems that she makes her way by negotiating the haze they create in her path.

The presence of this work in the ICA/Boston collection, one of two from the Bed of My Own Making series, contributes to the ICA’s effort to enhance the depth and range of works in the collection, and to examine the meaningful connections and distinctions between them.    

2008.1

Boston-based artist Ambreen Butt combines aspects of Persian and Mogul miniature painting with contemporary imagery, techniques, and subjects. The mark-making, characters, and illustrated worlds that populate Butt’s practice are purposefully varied, building on a visual, narrative language that Butt has developed over the course of her career. “I use figurative and abstract symbolism, visual reference from the art history as well as contemporary images from the mass media for my viewer to connect with my work at multiple levels.”

Multiplicité (AB95) depicts a heroine in multiple, as iterations of her character emerge from the mouths of a five-headed dragon with arms in motion and a resolute expression. A spool of hair spiraling around the body of one figure is formed of her own tresses joining those of another. At the lower right, the green and white dots of the dragon’s scales cover our cloned heroine’s skin, blurring the distinction between her and the hydra: did the monster beget her, or vice versa? Butt creates further ambiguity at a formal level, borrowing from Persian painting both the demon figure and the technique of stitching, while deconstructing their traditional use. Here, rather than binding together pages, thread has entered the drawing itself, outlining the contours of the female figure from which the image of the dragon emerges.

Inspired by wasli, the traditional method of laminating sheets to create a single strong surface on which to paint, Butt’s sewn pages create an illusion of spatial depth and phased passage of time while maintaining the thinness of the page. The exquisite and careful detailing allow Butt to explore the visual relationships between symbol, line, color, and scale, often as a personal response to social and political events. “I try to find multiple ways to decode or unravel that personal language,” explains the artist. “In order to fulfill that ultimate need, I use both figuration and abstraction in a platform that is purely my own.”

800.07.4

A student of Persian and Mogul miniature painting, Ambreen Butt expands on the format of this ancient technique to produce works laced with historical reference and contemporary resonance. With intimately scaled imagery on overlaid sheets of stitched Mylar and paper, she weaves open-ended narratives that are both physically and conceptually layered. Butt’s experience as a Pakistani Muslim in the pre– and post–9/11 climate of the United States has grounded her depictions of a recurring heroine gracefully poised in the face of conundrum, entanglement, and identity struggle.

The 1999 series Bed of My Own Making introduced Butt’s female protagonist, replicated and looped in cycles of impending calamity. While loosely based on the nayika, a seductive heroine who leads viewers into the action in Persian painting, the figure at the center of the action in Butts’s work is herself; she is both perpetrator and target, cause and effect. In Untitled, a lone figure, shown in profile, holds a lit torch. She appears to be about to step forward, yet her hair, so long that it coils around her ankles, moors her to a tree behind her. Capable yet caught, empowered yet facing consequences, the heroine is in a universal situation that Butt says is “about making choices and living with them for better or for worse.”

Butt was the first recipient of the ICA Artist Prize (now the James and Audrey Foster Prize) in 1999. The addition of this piece thus marks the ICA/Boston’s history and enriches the collection of works on paper, contributing to the museum’s strength in figurative work and expanding its global reach.

800.07.3

Louise Bourgeois has been creating poignant, cathartic work for more than seventy years, exploring sexuality, the human form, and traumatic events from her childhood. Janus is an evocatively corporeal object, formed out of sleekly polished, milky-hued porcelain. Bourgeois is well known for sculptural work in a variety of media, including marble, bronze, plaster, and fabric, but ceramic is a rarity in her oeuvre. After a period in the late 1950s when Bourgeois withdrew from the art world, in the 1960s she began experimenting with organic and biomorphic forms. She created six versions of Janus in 1968: five in bronze and one in porcelain. Each piece in this series is delicately suspended by a single wire, free to spin on its axis. Other hanging sculptures from this era include the amorphous painted bronze Fée Couturière, 1963, and the phallic latex-and-plaster sculpture Fillette, 1968, with which Bourgeois famously posed for her portrait by Robert Mapplethorpe in 1982. The title references the Roman god Janus, the god of gates, doorways, and beginnings and endings, who is often portrayed as having two heads facing in opposite directions. Indeed, the month of January, the beginning of each year, is named after this god. There is a sense of fragility and purity in Janus, with its smooth, clean form rendered in porcelain, in comparison to its companion pieces cast in the more fleshy bronze. A duality of meaning can often be found in Bourgeois’s work, with forms appearing at once male and female, abstract and representational, menacing and nurturing. In Janus, we see mirrored forms drooping in opposite directions from a central point, a blending of female and male anatomy that creates a disarming sculpture.

There are two versions of Janus in the ICA/Boston collection—one in porcelain and one in bronze—which enables the institution to represent a key early series by one of the most influential artists of the past century.

2009.2

Working in sculpture, drawing, and printmaking, Louise Bourgeois—one of the twentieth century’s most celebrated artists—has explored themes such as trauma, sexuality, and everyday life. Beautiful Night is a nine-color lithograph depicting a boldly colored landscape of pink, orange, and red hills. Printed on music paper, the print is a buoyant and hopeful image, especially for an artist best known for delving into the darker aspects of life. This print retains Bourgeois’s graphic style. Here we see her signature mark-making, as in the mountains formed by her spiraling, obsessive lines and repeated strokes. The landscape is dotted with two leafless trees and a full moon. Bourgeois said of this work: “The trees symbolize a couple on their first date. It’s a beautiful moonlit night that they will remember forever.” This quote relates to what Bourgeois has referred to as the toi et moi (you and me), a theme in her work that speaks to the intricacies of human interaction or relationships. As curator Deborah Wye points out in her catalogue essay for the Museum of Modern Art’s 1994 exhibition The Prints of Louise Bourgeois, it is a topic that the artist repeatedly returns to in her prints.

This print was made as part of the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s BAMart program, a fundraising initiative that offers works donated by visual artists. The addition of Beautiful Night to the ICA/Boston collection expands the museum’s Bourgeois holdings to include a work on paper, increasing the ICA’s ability to showcase the many dimensions of this eminent artist.

2008.3

Noriko Furunishi is known for her otherworldly depictions of deserts, mountains, ridges, and riverbeds through a combination of traditional and digital photographic techniques. Many of her photographs have vertical formats and layered compositions and recall traditional Japanese and Chinese landscape painting. Rather than provide a fixed point of view, Furunishi’s work invites the viewer’s eye to wander across the photograph, allowing the photographic image to freely recede and advance.

Furunishi took the source photographs for Untitled (Grey Dry Stream) near Death Valley, California, using a 4 x 5 viewfinder camera; she photographed several different locations, each from multiple angles and positions. She then scanned these negatives into a computer, using the digital files to compose and collage multiple views. With digital technology, the landscape becomes a flexible medium that Furinishi can manipulate at will—eliminating details, adding others, mixing perspectives, and even blending different locations or times of day. Nature’s vibrant colors and varied textures are the raw materials she uses to create her compositions. Untitled (Grey Dry Stream) presents a disorienting, dreamlike view of the world. It hints at terrain or topography we may have visited or seen in a photograph; at the same time, it moves beyond this familiarity and suggests another dimension beyond our sight or time. The photograph is part of her Landscapes series, in which space and earth are warped, twisted, and distorted, confounding viewers’ points of view.

Untitled (Grey Dry Stream) adds to the ICA/Boston’s strong collection of photography, joining works by Catherine Opie, Richard Prince, and Shannon Ebner that also reinterpret the landscape in powerful ways.

2017.24

2009.7

2009.8