Srijon Chowdhury: Same Old Song / Door to the Atmosphere

This fall the Frye Art Museum proudly presents Srijon Chowdhury: Same Old Song and the group exhibition Door to the Atmosphere, interlocking projects that together mark a tendency toward spirituality, myth, and the supernatural among artists working today in the United States. Same Old Song is the first solo museum exhibition for Portland-based artist Srijon Chowdhury, who also serves as co-curator of Door to the Atmosphere with Frye Chief Curator Amanda Donnan.  

Same Old Song stages a dramatic climax of Chowdhury’s practice to date. At the exhibition’s core is an installation of six enormous new paintings, each of which centers on one sensory organ of the human head, including eyes, ears, nose, and a mouth that is thirty feet long. The central facial feature in each piece frames or incorporates smaller images, which are sampled from Chowdhury’s previous paintings to create what the artist describes as an “alternative retrospective” of his work. Conjuring up a mixture of cultural associations—from Christian church art to carnival attractions—the installation is the latest of Chowdhury’s projects to assume architectural dimensions.   

The exhibition also includes a selection of the artist’s more intimately scaled recent paintings, along with the mural-sized canvas Pale Rider (2019) and a sculptural wrought-iron fence composed of text. Behind this barrier, the artist has placed Franz von Stuck’s iconic early twentieth-century painting Die Sünde (Sin) from the Frye’s Founding Collection. The text of the fence also references artistic forebear William Blake, blending Blake’s poem A Divine Image (1804) with a protection spell written by Chowdhury in a monogram-like script drawn from medieval occult practices. Bringing this mystical intent to bear alongside paintings of epic proportion, Chowdhury tests the power of age-old symbols and art forms to compel in the modern world. 

Same Old Song is accompanied by a full-color catalogue that presents an overview of the rising artist’s career and features essays by Donnan, art historian Mónica Belevan, and philosopher SJ Cowan. 

Door to the Atmosphere includes artworks in a range of mediums by Sedrick Chisom, Harry Gould Harvey IV, Cindy Ji Hye Kim, Mimi Lauter, Jill Mulleady, Naudline Pierre, Eden Seifu, and TARWUK. Apocalyptic visions, celestial visitations, and mysterious rituals and manifestations appear across these artists’ works, reflecting the wonder and the dread of living in the present as well as specters of unsettled pasts. The exhibition title, borrowed from a drawing by Harry Gould Harvey IV, suggests a threshold one might cross from earth to ether, from the specific to the speculative, from surfaces to essences, sensations, and mood.   

Artists have sought such metaphorical portals in previous periods of existential crisis. Fin de siècle European culture gave rise to the fraught mythic imagination of the Symbolists and the hallucinatory intensity of the Expressionists. Many of the artists included in Door to the Atmosphere cite the influence of these forebears—as well as that of earlier visionaries like Francisco de Goya and William Blake. At the same time, while they incorporate themes from classical mythology, devotional imagery, and the occult, they draw just as often on newer traditions such as psychoanalysis and science fiction. Some include an element of social critique, alluding to legacies of exploitation and violence that haunt our present and can cloud future imaginings.   

Ranging from visceral assemblages of scavenged “relics” to ecstatic landscapes and eerie dream tableaux, the works in the exhibition chart multiple routes into the liminal space between what is and what might be. Whether seeking transcendence or, in the words of TARWUK, “the emotionally charged undertow,” they open doors to other realms and alternate realities. 

Srijon Chowdhury: Same Old Song is organized by Amanda Donnan, Chief Curator. Door to the Atmosphere is co-curated by Chief Curator Amanda Donnan and artist Srijon Chowdhury. Generous support for both exhibitions is provided by the Frye Foundation and Frye Members. Media sponsorship is provided by The Stranger.

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