Visitor Center, a solo exhibition at Anne Reid ‘72 Gallery, Princeton Day School, organized by Gwen Shockey
January 13, 2025 – March 7, 2025
︎ Link to Anne Reid ‘72 Gallery
Installation Images
Princeton, NJ – New exhibit opens January 13, 2025, with planned public reception at Princeton Day School’s Anne Reid ’72 Gallery on Thursday, January 16 from 3-5pm, featuring work by Sunny Leerasanthanah.
Anne Reid ’72 Gallery at Princeton Day School presents Visitor Center, an exhibition by Brooklyn-based artist Sunny Leerasanthanah. Leerasanthanah will transform the gallery through installation and projected film in a new iteration of an on-going project exploring immigration in the United States through the lens of narratives surrounding the National Park and invasive species. In their film Certain Aliens (2023), originally commissioned by the John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Sheboygan, Wisconsin and on loan for this exhibition, “...three actors role-play as American National Park Service rangers and respond to prompts about invasive species. The improvisational performances deconstruct xenophobic ideas and language, using satire as a guiding tool to explore lived experiences and belonging.”1 Alongside their film, the artist employs found objects, text, and visuals from news articles, government documents, the National Park Service, and writings by theorists, historians, and scientists to examine attitudes towards invasive species and fraught intersections between nature and culture. Leerasanthanah’s art is inspired by their own experience of assimilation as an immigrant to the United States.
The show included the film Certain Aliens (2023) and invasive species prints Alien Threat, Try ‘n’ Find, Creeping, Crawling, and The Invaders (2023)
New works in the show:
Natural History, 2025
Mixed media; dimensions variable
Collage series of images extracted from various books
Look Out, 2025
Vinyl text installation on glass; dimensions variable
Text extracted from: 1) A display about invasive species awareness and prevention at the National Park Service’s Ernest F. Coe Visitor Center, Everglades National Park, FL; 2) The revised didactic label from the “Old New York” diorama in the Theodore Roosevelt Memorial Hall at the American Museum of Natural History, NY. “[...] The Museum added new text to the display to help visitors re-examine the encounter depicted…and to correct misrepresentations of the Native people and their relationship with colonists. This is part of a larger effort to acknowledge the ongoing impact of colonialism, as well as the urgent need to reconceive how diverse peoples and cultures are represented in the Museum.”
Tree samples from Tree of Heaven by Daniel Pravit Fethke and Sunny Leerasanthanah, 2023
Remnants of Ailanthus altissima with traces of Spotted Lanternfly infestation; dimensions variable
Samples of tree cuttings from the mixed-media video installation Tree of Heaven, which chronicles the felling of an Ailanthus altissima (Tree of Heaven) that was infested by Spotted Lanternfly in Brooklyn. Originally exhibited at Swale House in Governors Island, NYC.
Both the Tree of Heaven and Spotted Lanternfly are considered invasive species in the United States.