Curatorial Statement

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The utilization of monuments for artist Trisha Gupta serves as an analogue for the real-world happenings, folktales, and personal experiences of people who exist around them. As a second generation Indian living in America, Gupta knows the experience of a traveler in transit between places, and a monument offers a sense of constancy amidst life’s variation. Her relationship to the George Washington Bridge specifically reflects the period of time in which she was living over it in a thirty-second floor apartment in Washington Heights.

A precariously perched balcony offered this busy medical student and art practitioner a place to breathe after hectic days; a bit of privacy for phone conversations with friends and loved ones; a haven for reflection and introspection and a sense of freedom to observe the ebb and flow of the city that would often feel as though it was tugging her and all its inhabitants in several directions at once. She employed a daily regimen for producing this series of prints over a period of fifty days in which the artist dedicated herself to producing one print a day no matter how exhausted she may have been from her daily commitments and demands.

The result is a collection of personal moments and interpersonal moments that she observed first-hand or were relayed to her in conversations with fellow artists, colleagues, or her sister. Perhaps it was the blare of firetrucks resounding in real-time, or a tale related to her of someone who froze to death in connection with the bridge during a frigid New York City winter, or even the emotions she was parsing at the end of an anxious day staring wearily into the night sky over the city. These experiences would serve as catalysts for the daily print, and the result is a collection of narrative microcosms.