Hemali Bhuta, In this world of the familiar I search for the unknown In wonder my song bursts forth, 2021. Lac dye, dye from dried leaves of trees on Bangal khadi cotton, 216 1/2 x 216 1/2 inches. Courtesy Ceysson & Benetiere. © Adam Reich.
This warm and elusive show can be befuddling. Its reach is far and subtle, and embraces many modalities while its expression is quiet and minimal. It is what it isn’t. Titled and the epic did not happen!, Hemali Bhuta’s two-room installation, curated by Anne Couillaud, renders the COVID shutdown concrete in its physical investigation of time and place and color, but its effects are fleeting.
In the main room hangs a huge sheet of fabric, colored in reddish-stained squares sewn unevenly together with pronounced seams. The fabric extends to the ground where it meets a strip of white, perhaps unbleached cloth, and falls into a large swath of blue on the floor. In back of this curtain of fabric, but in front of the two windows behind it, are two faded green cyanotypes on cotton with images of plants and flowers that continually develop as the sun bleaches them.
