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11/6/2014

Poonam Jain

Clark House Initiative, Bombay

Poonam Jain obstructs legibility by mathematical distortions of words. Truth has an aggregated understanding in Jaina philosophy. It is the summation of various perspectives that challenge absolute truth. Multiplicity of perspectives and varied viewpoints disallow any one human’s interpretation of the truth as absolute. The Jainas opposed all aspects of ritual purity as a prerequisite in spiritual pursuit. They classified numbers into innumerable, enumerable and infinite categories. Even the infinite was subdivided as per the direction in which it was to be devised. To describe infinity, algebraic treatises of Jain mathematicians compounded the number Zero, its Pali translation describes it as Shunya or the void. Understanding this void is what directs the irreverence and immateriality of Jainism.

Poonam as a child observed her family devise complex methods of inventory and bookkeeping at their stationery store. Her vocabulary of encodings, the structures of her works, have resonance with the complex coding of mantras or astrological texts. In ‘Evidence of Hope/ Infinity’ she counts in a book until infinity, using an abstruse system, evolving strategies of conceptual art – repetition, enumeration, that put us within reach of the macro, and the inter-connectivity of all things, such that the very large and the very small, come to have equivalence. While infinity is dry, in Poonam’s work, it becomes a record of reachings. In ‘Letter to me’, transposing letters into tiny sculptural object compositions, presently arranged to compose the words of her poem, ‘Graveyards of Utopia’, arranged neatly on shelves like words in drill notebooks. James Joyce’s ‘Portrait of a Young Artist’ provides a structure for the decoding of words, as she notes every word she knows in an English dictionary, in ‘A Story’. Utopias of freedom, come in the form of travel and learning, devoid of responsible convention – of being expected to smile. First via nun-hood (referenced in the work ‘Muhpatti’), then in migrating to a metropolis, a material journey, one that includes keys and the constant change of rented homes, she finds freedom in art making, in her pursuit of defining or searching for her personal infinite. Abandoning the idea of perfection as an infinite call, she constructs the graveyard of these utopias in her debut solo show.

Poonam Jain’s first solo exhibition transforms Clark House – a space she knows well – into a book, turning each wall into an architectural page, with stenciled page numbers on the wall. Inverting this, each of her sculptural artist books transpose houses and walls into books of avant-garde architectures, impossible, and relevant. Architecture and its geometry often become victims of her desire for imperfection. She creates drawings that deny straight ninety-degree angles of rooms, lines of walls, water, surrealist additions, and juxtaposition, deny any semblance of fixed shapes and space. She pads up a wall with carved erasers, each that has a smaller cube removed from its center, so that the rectangle now looks like a small home. Many of the Chapters of this exhibition deal with a locality in East Goregaon of Bombay. A film ‘Liquid Sky’, uses mirror to turn a polluted nala, once a river, into sky-clear water. The structures of its housing societies, the religious diversity, or religious isolation – are encoded into works like ‘Neighbours 14/100’, perhaps relating to a house number or pin code, but resembling the population percentage of a minority community?

Her drawings are delicate, she constructs letters out of minute pen drawn feathers where she exhorts the viewer to fly, to shed weight, the weight of their individual fears. An exercise book’s perpendicular lines are made circular through printing and her father’s stationary shop and scenes from it frame the boundary of yet another book, ‘Swastik visits Clony’. She constructs sculptures that are made of books, holding artificial feathers, ‘Swollen Walls’, or constructed by binding black plastic waste bags, ‘Black Walls’. Commenting on her generation, an English dictionary conjoins itself with a spiritual almanac, ‘Closed Bridge’ both back covers offer paths to knowledge, one through language, the other offers solutions to existential questions.

The starting points of her works begin in details – drawings, rulers, erasers, cotton swabs, feathers – which multiply, expand or contract in space, the way fractals would have the potential to do; or as in the infinity encompassed in -1, 0, 1 (minus-one-zero-one) of a graph sheet, retaining the possibilities for the macro or a sense of the universe, in small daily events. Walking down a small flight of stairs, referenced in ‘Everyday’ – an interstices – between two levels of duplex social housing, can have in it the momentary desire to erase error; leading her to a structure of history itself, how history proceeds on itself, how the slanting networks of convergences fuse into a chaos of historic events, and how the human desire to erase or clean the settling dust, gives way to new structures of error. Her mathematically calculated irreverence and careful sculpture, narrate imperfection - imperfection that is delicate and detailed, become her path to immateriality.

- Sumesh Sharma and Zasha Colah

The Chapters:
Poonam Jain, ‘Chapter 1: Muhpatti’, watercolour on paper, 172mm x 65mm, 2013.
Poonam Jain, ‘Chapter 2a: House of Feathers’, pen on paper, 765mm x 580mm, 2012.
Poonam Jain, ‘Chapter 2b: House of Feathers’, pen on paper, 375mm x 280mm, 2012.
Poonam Jain, ‘Chapter 3: Letter to Me’, plaster of paris and fevicol sculptures, cement sheets, dimensions variable, 2011, 2014.
Poonam Jain, ‘Chapter 4: Evidence of Hope/ Infinity’, pencil and pen, diary, 212mm x 295mm, 2012.
Poonam Jain, ‘Chapter 5: Statistics of statistics’, found wikipedia page, digital print on paper, dimensions variable, 2014.
Poonam Jain, ‘Chapter 6: Feathered Walls’, feathers, book, glue, and metal handles; wooden swing pedestal, 220mm x 270mm x 150mm, 2014.
Poonam Jain, ‘Chapter 7: Black Walls’, garbage bags, cardboard book cover, brass handles; wooden swing pedestal, 165mm x 210mm x 70mm, 2014.
Poonam Jain, ‘Chapter 8: Swollen House’, feathers, book, glue, and metal handles; wooden swing pedestal, 2014.
Poonam Jain, ‘Chapter 9: Swastik visits Clony’, digital prints on paper bound into notebook, 190mm x 153mm x 5mm, edition of 10, 2013.
Poonam Jain, ‘Chapter 10: Practice Book’, digital prints on paper bound into notebook, 170mm x 141mm, edition of 10, 2014.
Poonam Jain, ‘Chapter 11: Closed Bridge’, Pocket English Dictionary and Book of Jain Mantras, 160mm x 185mm x 58mm, 2014.
Poonam Jain, ‘Chapter 12: Number Dictionary’, found object (safe), 180mm x 117mm x 56mm, 2014.
Poonam Jain, ‘Chapter 13: Fractal Communities’, 1 & 4, pen on paper, 290mm x 210mm, 2014.
Poonam Jain, ‘Chapter 13: Fractal Communities’, 2,3,5,6,7,&8, pen on paper, 220mm x 168mm, 2014.
Poonam Jain, ‘Chapter 14: Hand-bowl’, pen on paper drawings, papier-mache and brass, 170mm x 170mm x 120mm, 2014.
Poonam Jain, 'Chapter 15: MHADA -101’, erasers, dimensions variable, 2014.
Poonam Jain, ‘Chapter 16: Match the following’ from the series MHADA -101, erasers, dimensions variable, 2014.
Poonam Jain, ‘Chapter 17: Liquid Sky’ from the series MHADA -101, video, (documentation of outdoor installation, mirror, nala), on loop, 2014.
Poonam Jain, ‘Chapter 18: Single’ from the series MHADA -101, pen on paper, 615mm x 1180mm, 2011-2014.
Poonam Jain, ‘Chapter 19: Neighbours 14/100’ from the series MHADA -101, ink on graph paper, 370mm x 394mm, 2009.
Poonam Jain, ‘Chapter 20: Lets walk in a straight line’, ink on paper, 523mm x 402mm, 2013.
Poonam Jain, ‘Chapter 21: Drill Practice’, from the series Lets walk in a straight line, ink on paper, 523mm x 402mm, 2013.
Poonam Jain, ‘Chapter 21: Small Worlds', from the series MHADA -101, pen and pencil on wall, dimensions variable, 2014.
Poonam Jain, ‘Chapter 22: Statistics of Alphabets’, pencil on wall, dimensions variable, 2014.
Poonam Jain, ‘Chapter 23: -101’, found acrylic 3D rulers, dimensions variable, 2014.
Poonam Jain, ‘Chapter 24: Everyday‘, from the series MHADA -101, cotton swabs and fevicol, dimensions variable, 2014.

Preview: Thursday 12 June 2014, 5pm - 9pm

Clark House Initiative is a curatorial collaborative and a union of artists based in Bombay.

Clark House Bombay
c/o RBT Group, Ground Floor, Clark House building, Colaba
8 Nathalal Parekh Marg (Old Wodehouse Road), Bombay 400039, India
Open all days including Sundays, 10am - 7pm

Opposite Sahakari Bhandar and Regal Cinema, next to Woodside Inn.
Open all days including Sundays from 11am-7pm during exhibitions.

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