February 4-28, 2021
Gallery Wendi Norris is pleased to present works by Ambreen Butt and Eva Schlegel on 8-bridges, a gallery platform that brings the Bay Area art world together. Click here to view.
Ambreen Butt’s intricate collage works on paper celebrate formal elements of color and pattern central to traditional Indian and Persian miniature painting. Trained in these techniques in Lahore, Pakistan, Butt has re-imagined the rigorous art form. Say My Name, her most recent and ongoing series, explores the relationship between power and vulnerability in order to pay homage to innocent lives lost in international warfare. Butt’s process begins with staining the paper in tea. She then separately and repeatedly writes or prints out an individual name, shreds it into pieces, and arranges and glues the shredded fragments to her tea-stained paper in dense, swirling patterns. This process, undertaken with repetitive and transformational urgency, becomes a form of meditation. The result elevates the names into shapes of exquisite grace and enduring strength.
Eva Schlegel’s photography often focuses on the overlooked beauty within intimate, commonplace spaces. By removing details in her images, often by shooting out-of-focus or blurring the details later, Schlegel distills what is otherwise familiar and unremarkable into compositions of transfixing allure. For her blurred architecture series, Schlegel reduced un-named architectural spaces into geometric abstractions. The minimal and ethereal images, set mostly in tones of white and gray, float the eye through physical environments in ways impossible in real time and space. For her Untitled (dragonfly) works, Schlegel spontaneously witnessed and captured two dragonflies mating at a dinner party. The resulting photographs freeze in time a natural phenomenon of little human consequence. Edited with x-ray-like contrast, the images appear otherworldly, simultaneously banal and extraordinary.
Images (from top): Ambreen Butt, Nawab (17), 2020, Text and 24 karat gold on tea-stained paper. Paper: 30 x 20 inches (76.2 x 50.8 cm) Framed: 36 x 28 x 1 ½ inches; Eva Schlegel, Untitled (Dragonfly 2), 2019 Inkjet on Hahnemühle Bütten handmade paper. Paper: 30 x 20 inches (76.2 x 50.8 cm) Framed: 50 ½ x 30 ½ x 2 inches; Eva Schlegel, Untitled (Dragonfly 2), 2019, Inkjet on Hahnemühle Bütten handmade paper Paper: 30 x 20 inches (76.2 x 50.8 cm) Framed: 50 ½ x 30 ½ x 2 inches