CSUMB visiting artist Mukherjee peels the layers from her work

By Mark Muckenfuss

Ranu Mukherjee opened her guest lecture at Cal State Monterey Bay on Wednesday, April 3, with a video showing a moving collage of what appeared to be different-colored torn shards of paper. The bits and pieces swirled haphazardly for several minutes before finally coalescing into the image of a cave with a small stream running out of it. 

The piece served as a good introduction for the mostly student audience that came to hear the San Francisco-based artist speak. Mukherjee’s work is often a confluence of different thoughts, themes and influences that play out in multi-media pieces that incorporate everything from fabric to paint to digital photographs and video with choreographed dancers. Elements are overlaid many times over to achieve complex images that use line drawings, painted objects and graphic illustrations. 

Ideas overlay in the work as well. Time, climate change, social upheaval and nature are recurring themes. 

Her opening video, she said, “links up the Exclusion Act [a 19th-century law limiting Chinese immigration], gold mining and the mining blast that made this cave. Part of my research was to look into the history of the Gold Rush. I also worked with women whose families were affected by the Exclusion Act.”

Some of the other pieces she showed were inspired by the Northern California fires in 2017. Plants, people and animals were layered over one another. Some photos featured dancers lying on or interacting with dead trees that were surrounded by green grass. 

“It’s about how we’re all entangled,” she said. “I try not to separate nature and culture.”

Mukherjee’s lecture was part of a series sponsored by the Visual and Public Arts program. The visiting artist programs, which provide exposure to outside voices and artwork for art students, are free and open to the public. 

Two other lectures are planned for this semester. 

On Wednesday, April 24, painter, educator and commissioned public artist Jason Jägel will discuss his work. Jägel uses the syntax of comics to conjure fictional worlds where anything can happen at any time. He works in mosaic, large murals and other formats. 

One week later, on May 1, Adia Millett will visit the campus. Millett works in various mediums – including fabric, paint and wood – creating bold graphic-influenced images. Her work, she says, investigates the “fragile interconnectivity of all things.”

Both lectures are from 6-8 p.m. in Building 70.