The visual arts program at the Painted Bride proudly presents Phantasmal Pharmacopia contemporary installation works by Rina Banerjee. Phantasmal Pharmacopia opens at the Painted Bride Art Center, 230 Vine Street in Old City, Philadelphia on April 5, 2002 and is on display until May 27. The opening reception will be held First Friday, April 5, 2002 and will feature a gallery talk with the artist and curator at 7pm.

"nature is not just natural but is created as natural by human desires and intentions."
--Nancy Leys, Picturing Tropical Nature, from curator Susette Min’s essay, "Rina Banerjee’s Phantasmal Pharmacopia"
Rina Banerjee creates elaborate sculptural walk-through environments that explore the idea of the "garden" re-contextualized within the western urban landscape. At once inviting and foreboding, the structures created for Phantasmal Pharmacopia integrate a wide variety of materials including found objects, light bulbs, and Saran wrap, with orientalist details such as colorful bugs and vegetation, to create a "make -shift hothouse," that emulates the organic composition of a garden, while calling attention to the essentially synthetic construction of the structures. Banerjee chooses a seemingly incongruous juxtaposition of materials: exoticized, tropical hybrid plants and critters that characterize the "garden," as a refuge from controlled urban life, are found alongside familiar industrialized plastics, piping, and electrics commonly found in domesticated society. The fusion of fantastical centripedal creatures lurking beneath the plastic walls, images of bacteria positioned in narrow walkways, and the induced sensation of humidity through the use of electric generators, in dialectic with pieces of Styrofoam, bits of wire, neutralizing air fresheners, and steel beams in her installation comments on the colonialist desire to control and domesticate nature while indulging in the aspects of unfettered "other worldliness" that stimulates a diversion from modernity. These multi-dimensional, experiential habitats confront how western gardens espouse what is construed as nature, simultaneously alienating and drawing the viewer closer to nature while evoking the tensions between the natural and the artificial, the familiar and the exotic, the beautiful and the grotesque, the pure and the sinister, the western and the "other," in the modern age.
A provocative Indian-American artist, Rina Banerjee was a 2000 Whitney Biennial presenter, and has held five solo shows in the past two years in New York, (Whitney Museum of American Art, the Bronx Museum of Art, Debs & Co.), as well as South Africa and India. Her work has been reviewed by ARTForum, Art Matters, Art in America, The Art Papers, The New York Times and the New Yorker.

Phantasmal Pharmacopia is curated by Susette Min, PhD candidate in the Department of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkley. Min holds an MA and a PhD in American Civilization from Brown University, has participated in the Whitney Museum's Independent Study Program, and has curated at several venues throughout the country, including Apex Art, Highways, and Berkley Art Museum's MATRIX. Min recently completed her dissertation, Creative License: Walking Through Asian American Cultural Production in the 1980s and 1990s.

Phantasmal Pharmacopia is the premier event of the Bride’s No Orient-ation, a month-long multi-disciplinary festival that turns our attention to the Asian voice that resonates through contemporary arts and culture both here in America and abroad. No Orient-ation showcases the seamless assimilation of Asian experiences into the American identity, begging the question of what it means to be both Asian and American. This examination seeks to erase the preconceived notions of "otherness" and "exoticism" associated with Asian culture, while celebrating the vastness of the Asian imprint on the international aesthetic.
Funding for No Orient-ation is provided by the National Endowment of the Arts and the William Penn Foundation.
For more information, call the Painted Bride’s box office at 215.925.9914, or go to www.paintedbride.org. The Painted Bride is located at 230 Vine Street in Old City, Philadelphia.