Mukherjee, Ranu Phantasmagoric EXCERPT 2016 3 channel Hybrid Film (HD) 21 minutes Phantasmagoric, a three channel hybrid film commissioned by LA County Museum of Art, uses the extreme horizontal to magnify and collapse multiple trajectories of gold; as slowly forming earth element, commodity, object of projection and desire, vessel for the sacred and ancient arrival from outer space. It is composed of hundreds of layers using photographic, painted and digital imagery animated into a fluid and slowly morphing space. Phantasmagoric recasts elements of Ranu Mukherjee’s trilogy Extracted; on view and in production with the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco. Through the crossing of lesser known histories of the California Gold Rush and Chinese mythologies, Mukherjee considers the California landscape as site for extraction, speculation and excess, visualizing it as molten and shifting, bodily and cosmic. Elements unearthed in mining blasts (Breach, 2015) replay in staggered sequences, filling the frames at varying speeds. Images of consumer and historic gold objects float and are jettisoned across screens. From the rocks ooze an elixir- a painted substance which refers to the elixir of immortality in Chinese mythology that is made from gold, mercury, cinnabar and fungus. For Mukherjee the elixir is seen for both its role as a portal to the afterlife as well as a symbol of liquid capital, in correspondence with gold mining and its byproducts (Elixir, 2016). Coyotes make appearances as fellow creaturely inhabitants, foragers and communicators. Within the work the Coyotes, simultaneously fantastical and mundane, embody a confrontation between two kinds of speculation- one associated with imagination and the other with economy and risk. The work visualizes a cycle of extraction and material reconfiguration that is foundational and continues to craft worlds.