Ranu Mukherjee
Ecstatic Picture: Spilled Milk, 2011 
Hybrid film
Five minutes, four seconds
Ed. 1/5
Courtesy of Gallery Wendi Norris

Retail value: $4,000

In a radically surreal approach to film, Ranu Mukherjee recontextualized both secular and religious imagery, often mixing traditional iconography and contemporary technology within the same piece. The artist intentionally keeps her filmmaking process visible. She encourages the jarring, thought-provoking effects of seemingly disparate content as she mixes photography, painting, and digital animation. 

This work is one of three hybrid films exhibited in Mukherjee’s solo show at Gallery Wendi Norris in 2011. In it, she combined her interests in nomadism and in India’s postcolonial economic evolution. In Ecstatic Picture: Spilled Milk, Mukherjee animated what she calls “auspicious” imagery to map India’s transition to a post-colonial autonomous economy and its place in the global marketplace. Her wide range of sources includes 19th-century Indian lithographs and modern communication devices such as cell phones. Images of milk, flowers, a green plant slowly morph into cell phones. Mukherjee takes in the power of silence. Accompanied by the moving image, the silent film generates a mesmeric state, perhaps the “ecstatic” condition referred to in the title. Her painterly effects prompted Mukherjee to label her medium “hybrid film.”  

Ranu Mukherjee was born in 1966 in Boston and currently lives and works in San Francisco. She cofounded the collective Orphan Drift in London in the 1990s, and worked solely with that collaborative from 1994 to 2005. She has participated in numerous exhibitions and screenings at venues in London; Oslo; Berlin; Oberhausen, Germany; Glasgow; Istanbul; Vancouver, Canada; Santiago; and Capetown. Her first solo exhibition in the United States opened at Frey Norris Contemporary, San Francisco, in June 2011. She was an exhibiting artist in Bay Area Now 6 at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco. Mukherjee received her BFA from the Massachusetts College of Art, Boston, in 1988 and her MFA from the Royal College of Art, London, in 1993.  She is currently an associate professor in the Fine Arts graduate department at California College of the Arts, San Francisco, and a visiting professor in New Genres at the San Francisco Art Institute.

Mukherjee’s work can be seen at SJMA this fall in the exhibition Ranu Mukherjee: Telling Fortunes. 

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