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ShareJeet Thayil's introductory essay, The Future Infinitives might be a moreappropriate title for the current show of photographs by Gauri Gill: The Americans.
'Almost Americans' might coalesce a sense of the images -- a kind of people lost in transition, searching between Bud Light and Khalsa, a movement and an identity.
As you walk into the gallery, you are visuallyassaulted by more images than might be necessary. The walls seem to be papered with photographs that are not unfamiliar -- they would remind you of the picturesso many of us have of family and friends in the United States.
You would have to crawl on the floor and then climb a ladder to view all
the images, so in that sense the way the exhibition has been mounted at shoots itself in the foot, in a mannerof speaking.
Many of the photographs are diptychs and within the image itself there is sometimes another duality; this then becomes too much of a good thing. Some of theimages have been cleverly juxtaposed so that you are not sure where the wall/post/ window ends and the new frame begins.
Vaguely reminiscent of the 'single take' music videos of the '90s. There is a sense of inside and outside -- often, that is the only clue that the images are of the Sikh community, taken mostly in the USA.
The exhibition is hardly representative of the Punjabi community living abroad, but is, rather, a slightlyextended family album. The Buick in the driveway, the maple and elm trees, the motel, the mobile home or the Santa Claus in the window are often the only indications that some of the images are actually shot in America; most of the others could almost have been done in Ludhiana, Noida or Gurgaon.
Gill's images have adocumentary flavour, sometimes with humour as an added layer -- like a cut-out of the Taj Mahal, with its fake, cloud-filled-sky backdrop, dwarfed in a crowded street by the tall buildings around it. There are also predictably 'monsoon weddings' and Bend it like Beckham-style visuals.
The most striking photograph is of a young, upwardly mobile Asian couple getting into their separate automobiles; the lack of communication between them is the most telling aspect.
The other frames that make you look twice are those with images within them, either placed on the television set or peering out of the photo frames on the walls of the house. The diptych of the Shaivite Tambrams is reflective, not just because it is shot into a mirror.
And the subject of a more interesting social discourse could be the small cut-outs of women in saris and newspaper clippings of the American dream becoming a nightmare: 'Parul Patel strangulated to death by her 24-year-old-husband'.
The Americans, C&L Gallery, till April 24
