IMAGES

Top: Dayanita Singh, Fausto’s Library,
Florence, 2003.

Bottom: Dayanita Singh, Covered Chairs, Coimbatore, 2003.

  In the spring of 2003 Singh traveled to Florence to meet with furniture scholar Fausto Calderai. He introduced her to various houses in the city, including his own, so she could photograph interiors that contained examples of unusual furniture. Singh spent an entire day in Calderai’s apartment, “conversing with his chairs,” as she puts it. She moved from room to room, photographing as the light changed. From the resulting contact sheets, she compiled a small artist’s book as a gift to Calderai; this book is now on view in the Long Gallery alongside a book on Coimbatore, where she travelled with designer Andrea Anastasio in the winter of 2003 — the Florence and Coimbatore Diaries.
   To create the Chairs exhibition Singh continued her dialogue with Calderai. They planned an evocative rearrangement of furniture in the Little Salon to reinforce the strong sense of individuality many chairs possess. In An Arrangement of Blue Chairs, the furniture is positioned as for an imaginary family gathering, conveying the moods and personalities of the room’s absent occupants.
  Meanwhile the feelings and thoughts triggered by the viewing of Singh’s little books generated another series of narrations resulting in Amnesia. Here Anastasio engages in an intimate dialogue with Singh’s photographs projecting them on a chair from the museum’s collection.
  All photographs, installations and conversations in the Chairs exhibition are a blend of understanding and wondering. As these threads were woven together, the process was documented by filmmaker Michael Sheridan in Conversations. Opportunities for the public to discuss the Chairs exhibition and to explore other chairs in the museum’s collection will be offered in March by Carla Hartman, the Gardner’s first museum Educator-in-Residence.
  In the solitude of the museum’s carriage house Singh made her first artist book for a writer friend. Since then she has made thirteen such books each one created for a specific person: a private exhibition for one individual. In lieu of an exhibition catalogue Singh decided to print an artist book in this unique intimate format. One thousand books have been printed: five hundred for sale at the museum and five hundred to be privately distributed by friends of the artist.

Support for the Chairs exhibition and the Gardner Museum’s Program for Creativity is generously provided by William C. and Joyce K. Fletcher.

The Program for Creativity brings artists, scholars and educators together to inspire each other and to develop new work in the Gardner Museum’s unique environment. Building on the success of the Gardner’s Artist-in-Residence program, this initiative experiments with new ways for the public to understand both the process and the results of creative collaboration.

From the time of Dayanita Singh’s first residency in 2002 through the present, the Artist-in-Residence program has been made possible, in part, by patrons of the Centennial Program Fund, the Barbara Lee Program Fund, The Ford Foundation, The Wallace-Reader’s Digest Funds, the Thomas Anthony Pappas Charitable Foundation, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the Nimoy Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts.