Seher Shah

AMOA-ARTHOUSE presents "Constructed Landscapes", Seher Shah's first solo museum exhibition, where she explores ideas of large-scale urban relics in the landscape, such as monuments, buildings, and cenotaphs.

On view for the first time together, Shah’s seminal drawings, Geometric Landscapes and the Spectacle of Force, 2009, and The Mirror Spectacle, 2010, use archival imagery from the 1903 Delhi Durbar fairground during a British coronation ceremony. Combining archival imagery and contemporary hand-drawn and digital elements, these pieces include the inside and outside views of the ceremony. Shah incorporates elements of architecture, redrawn historical imagery, and the repetition of structural forms to create these spectacles. The 6 x 8 foot graphite and gouache drawing Object Relic (Unité d’ Habitation), 2011, rearticulates iconic French architect Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation, a low-income housing project constructed in 1952 in Marseille, France. In Shah’s hands, its regimented form has been disassembled into a sprawling grid and rectangular rooms, stripping the original structure of its height and mass. Constructed Landscapes will also include a new site-responsive sculptural work, Object Repetition, installed in the lobby of the Jones Center. Again, speaking to repetition, this work is composed of identically reductive geometric forms, which reference both buildings and the monolithic objects repeated throughout the exhibition in Shah’s drawings.