At Sackler, A First Taste Of Simryn Gill

Simryn Gill's "Forking Tongues" uses peppers and cutlery to comment on the passage and assimilation of material and ideas. (By Michael O'sullivan -- The Washington Post)

However visually striking Simryn Gill's "Forking Tongues" may be, the message of the artist's sculptural installation -- a 16-foot-wide spiral of antique cutlery and dried red peppers laid out on a low platform on the floor of the entrance pavilion to the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery -- is subtle almost to the point of inscrutability.

It helps, however, to know a little about the artist, who, as the wall text points out, was born in Singapore of Indian ancestry and Malaysian citizenship and who currently lives and works in Australia. Despite having shown her art widely in Asia, Europe and her adoptive homeland, this mini-retrospective, part of the Sackler's adventurous "Perspectives" series of contemporary art exhibitions, is Gill's first major U.S. exhibition.

Gill's background is significant because her work deals with history -- in this case the history of objects. Using the artist's own collection of thrift-shop knives, forks and spoons (of the type favored by colonials in 19th-century Asia), along with an assortment of spicy red peppers (whose origins may be South American and Asian but which can now be commonly found in Washington area stores), "Forking Tongues" makes subtle allusions to the passage and assimilation of material and ideas. The title, beyond its literal reference to cutlery and taste buds, also suggests falsehood, raising the question of what constitutes truth, as least as far as cultural identity is concerned in this age of globalization.

Additional works displayed in the museum proper continue to play with this idea, albeit on a level that is more personal than political. The photographs in Gill's "Forest" series, for example, document temporary interventions the artist made in the landscapes of her birthplace and in Malaysia, where she spent her childhood. Here, pages of books -- the Sanskrit epic "Ramayana," along with Joseph Conrad's novel "Heart of Darkness" and others -- have been torn to resemble leaves, roots and branches and placed into settings where they mimic the surrounding nature. Again, Gill is interested in the idea of blending in and the notion of new ideas taking root in old soil.

Works from Gill's "Pearls" series make up the show's final third. Consisting of strands of paper beads hand-rolled from texts chosen by friends and not originally intended for display, the art in this section whispers far more quietly than anything else in the show.

Its message, nevertheless, is part and parcel of Gill's overarching, and thought-provoking, theme: that ideas, like the food we consume and the books we cherish, may grant us membership in certain tribes, but they are for sharing and not ours alone.

PERSPECTIVES: SIMRYN GILL Through April 29 at the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, 1050 Independence Ave. SW (Metro: Smithsonian). 202-633-1000 (TDD: 202-357-1729). http://www.asia.si.edu. Open daily 10 to 5:30. Free.