WASHINGTON, DC.- The Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery present the exhibit Perspectives Simryn Gill through April 29, 2007. This is the first major exhibition in the United States of contemporary artist Simryn Gill (born 1959). Gill's works, consisting of found objects poetically transformed by the artist, examine relationships among nature, culture and knowledge as well as between individual and place. The works reveal a transnational perspective, evocatively referring to passages of material and literary cultures across borders.

Born in Singapore, Simryn Gill is of Indian ancestry and Malaysian citizenship; she currently resides in Sydney, Australia. She has exhibited extensively in Asia, Europe and Australia. The three works in the exhibition, which were created between 1992 and 2006, comprise a mini retrospective of her career.

"Forking Tongues," an elegant spiral 16 feet in diameter, is comprised of silver and red strands fashioned from silver-plate cutlery collected by the artist from thrift shops, and dried chili peppers from Asia and the Americas. Both materials possess particular histories of passage, begging the question of how things become assimilated into places. Trade routes and colonial encounters often resulted in a circulation of natural and material culture in many directions; foodstuffs as well as cultural habits crossed oceans and changed the lives of both colonizer and colonized. For example, the chili, indigenous to the Americas, migrated to South and Southeast Asia, where it dramatically altered the cuisine. Likewise, Asian dishes—from rijsttafel in Holland to curry lunches in England—appeared on the colonizer's table.

"Forest" includes 16 large-scale black-and-white photographs that document transitory installations placed among the trees and bushes in cultivated and uncultivated locales. For these installations, Gill tore the pages of books into shapes that closely mimic leaves, twigs and aerial roots and inserted these forms into gardens and roadside locations in Singapore, where she was born, and Port Dickson, Malaysia, where she spent her childhood. The texts, which range from the Indian epic "Ramayana," Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" and Defoe's "Robinson Crusoe," to Penelope Leach's manual on raising toddlers, were inserted into sites that include a deserted Chinese hotel, a mangrove swamp and a roadside tapioca stand. The subtly toned, somewhat mysterious photographs are exquisite records of Gill's interventions into local topographies laden with complex histories.

With the opening of the "Perspectives" exhibition, "Pearls" makes its public debut. Never having intended the series for display, Gill became inspired to exhibit "Pearls" at the Sackler after viewing the museum's collection of ancient jade, gold and glass beads during a March visit. Gill's "Pearls" are strands of beads fashioned from texts. The series began in 2000, when Gill began asking friends to give her a book that had deep personal significance. The artist then transformed each volume into a necklace of beads and returned it to the owner as a decorative, fetish or power object. Gill's choice for the Sackler of five "pearls" from the nearly 40 strands she has made in the last six years, resonates on both aesthetic and conceptual levels. Simryn Gill marks the first in a series of collaborative projects with the Queensland Art Gallery in New South Wales, Australia.