Priya Malhotra - contributing editor of Asian Art News, New York writes...

Interweaving: The art of Shelly Jyoti

“The past is not dead. In fact, it's not even past“. - William Faulkner

As India undergoes a fascinating process of modernization and transformation, these words from the great American writer are fitting when talking about an ancient country striving to marry its past with its present, maintain its traditions along with championing the cause of advancement, and uphold its unique identity without turning its back on the increasingly mall-like environment of the globalizing world. The marriage between tradition and modernity has already occurred in contemporary India and the wedded state of these two is sometimes rocky or tumultuous, like I suppose is the state of most marriages in their early years. Still, one thing definitely seems to be clear: the country does not want to give up the old or the new. Consequently, be it social mores or cultural expression, contemporary Indians are forging tradition and innovation to create new entities, those that are more than the sum of their parts, those that infuse Indian culture with contemporary and worldly perspectives, knowledge and technology. The past is being kept alive, even revived and acknowledged in ways it had not been for years, but in a reincarnated manner to the suit the current moment.

Most forms of Indian art and culture are experiencing a form of hybridization, but that is not to say that traditional forms are being lost. For example, when it comes to music, popular composer A.R. Rahman is blending music inspired by South Indian Carnatic ragas, Sufi melodies and many other strands, including Turkish and Chinese sounds. Younger star Anoushka Shankar, the Grammy-nominated composer and sitar player and daughter of legendary sitar player Ravi Shankar, combines sounds of traditional sitar, electronica beats and flamenco piano, amongst others, to create sensual and sublime contemporary world music. Even when it comes to fashion, Indians, in particular women, are not ready to abandon their saris and salwar kameezes even as they don the global uniform of jeans and T-shirts in urban areas. Instead, they are jazzing up traditional clothing in creative and exciting ways by wearing halter or tube top-inspired blouses with saris, kameezes with spaghetti straps combined with see-through salwars, ensembles ready to rival any Western garment with both their sassiness and sexiness, not to mention their alchemy of the highly traditional with the fiercely contemporary. Even when it comes to the visual arts, the old still holds its sway even as it beckons contemporaneity and the world outside. In fact, on any given day, if you go visiting art galleries in New Delhi, India’s capital city, you are likely to find several representations of Hindu Gods, particularly Ganesh, the elephant-headed God, whom I was once intrigued to see in an interesting Cubist rendition. Several contemporary artists such as Nilima Sheikh, Arpana Caur and Manjit Bawa are drawing upon mythological imagery, traditional art forms and folk motifs to create original, cutting-edge art that can confidently stand on the world stage. Nilima Sheikh, the renowned painter who has exhibited her work in several countries including the U.S., incorporates different traditional styles, ranging from Japanese Ukiyo-e prints to Rajasthani, Pahari and Mughal miniatures, to create vivid and magical paintings that have strong social and political messages. Which brings me to Shelly Jyoti, a fashion designer and artist, whose exquisite paintings exhibited in this show explore decorative elements of various traditional art forms, in particular those of centuries-old Mithila painting, but also ornamental elements of other traditions in an inventive manner that’s entirely her own.

It was in order to create a framework for Shelly’s body of work “Beyond Mithila: Exploring the Decorative” that I took this time to contextualize her work in 21st century India.
Without an understanding of what is happening in India where some new alliance is being forged at this moment, where some innovative amalgamation is happening as I write, Jyoti’s work is difficult to fully appreciate, especially since she is one of those actively conducting her own dialogue between the past and the present. In this body of work, Jyoti takes a great deal of her inspiration from Mithila or Madhubani paintings as they are popularly called, an ancient and popular folk art form practiced almost exclusively by women in the northern part of the state of Bihar in eastern India and centered around mythological, folk, and tantric themes. Mithila art is filled with symbols of fertility and prosperity like the fish, elephant, sun, moon, bamboo tree and lotus, and the colors, extracted from vegetable pigments, are bright and cheerful: green from the leaves, yellow from the turmeric plant, reddish-pink from the beetroot plant and orange from flowers.

“I am particularly attracted to the vivid colors and strong line work of Mithila art which has an amazing aesthetic appeal,” says Jyoti. “In fact, in all my art, which also includes figurative and abstract works, I’m attracted to vibrant shades, particularly red.”

While aspects of Mithila tradition are drawn upon in this decorative series, recognizably so, in Jyoti’s paintings, they are reinvented and augmented in a way to create works that are exuberant, intricate, well-put together and very exemplary of 21st century India. Not only does she use elements of Mithila painting, but she also takes inspiration from diverse decorative traditions from India and beyond, including a Persian embroidery known as zardozi from the Mughal era, a running stitch called kantha practiced by women from Calcutta in eastern India, and different Chinese embroideries. All of this is creatively resurrected and fused by Jyoti, who is guided by form, agnostic of source, forging her own brand of heterogeneous and ornamental paintings that are truly beautiful in a classic sense of the word. A designer as well, Jyoti says each garment she designed is, to her, like a piece of jewelry and these paintings, with their winding floral borders, intricately-patterned birds, and sumptuous pink lotuses, also look like pieces of jewelry.

On a final note, I’d like to mention how refreshing it will be to see such joyful and pleasurable art in the U.S. where decorative art, like in most contemporary art circles in the West, has been, for the most part, viewed in a dismissive light, and, consequently, kept out of serious contemporary art venues. The one time in recent U.S. history where decoration did have its day was during the pattern and design movement in the 70’s where artists like Kim MacConnel, Joyce Kozloff, and Miriam Schapiro, influenced by feminism and non-Western cultures, distanced themselves from dominant, high-brow styles like modernism and minimalism and embraced everything from Islamic textile designs and Mexican tile patterns to materials like laces and ribbons, bridging the gap between high and low art, between the Western and non-Western world, and created works that were totally postmodern in their blurring of boundaries. While, unfortunately, decorative elements are sparsely used amongst contemporary artists working in the West right now, lovers of the ornamental in the U.S do have a wonderful opportunity to see Shelly Jyoti’s bountiful paintings in Chicago this winter.

Priya Malhotra
February 2008

March 2007
JohnyML is a Delhi based art critic and writer. He holds post graduations in English Literature, Art History and Creative Curating. He is the chief editor and managing director of www.artconcerns.com


 Lyrical Abstractions: A Room of/for the Muses

A designer by profession and an artist by passion Shelly Jyoti, negotiates between two fields of aesthetic production. This negotiation of fields looks easier and apparently legitimized in the general discourse of culture as the creative self of the artist is marked out within this discourse as a ‘female’. The gendering of the artistic self by external agencies facilitates the co-optation of professional qualities into the generic notions about a woman’s ‘status’ in the society as a being who is ‘naturally’ inclined to ‘design’ and ‘decorative art’. Hence, if a woman does art while indulging seriously in any other profession, her art is viewed as a hobby, which is ‘natural’ to her making, that is her gendered self.

When the art created by a woman is dubbed as ‘hobby’, it becomes a process of sublimation, in which she invests her creative capital, strenuously culled out from her otherwise mundane existence. Then, as if it were a rule, the works produced during or as a part of this sublimation need not necessarily be shown to a public, which guarantees the legitimacy and worth of any creative act. To put it in other words, a woman’s art, if she is not from the field of the ‘acknowledged’ streams of art production, should be confined within a sphere where all her other daily activities are performed both in active and passive ways. The public should be kept outside her performative realms, both professional and domestic, in order to keep her prescribed social status untainted. The insistence on keeping the act of sublimation away from the purview of an authorized public renders her creative efforts into residuals of existence that doubly binds her in the domestic sphere.

Shelly Jyoti is acknowledged both as a designer and as an artist. However, she conceptually positions herself along with those women who are deprived of the ‘artist’ qualification despite their creative output. To articulate her concerns she problematizes her profession as a designer and a practitioner of art. While placing her acceptance as a designer in the public realm where her creativity is lauded without heeding to her gender specifications, she makes a juxtaposition of her status as an ‘artist’ and tries to deduce radical interpretations of those positions from the public. Jyoti actively engages the public/viewers with the notions of ‘public’ and ‘private’ pertaining to the creative life of a woman.

Following the line of Virginia Woolf who raised the issue of ‘creative space’ (a room of one’s own) for a woman, Shelly Jyoti too poses the Public-Private binary to locate her own artistic process as well as those of other women who engage in two realms of activity. She uses an inverted logic to achieve this engagement. She converts the gallery space, which is notionally considered as a public space for creative engagement, into a private room. A private room (especially in a domestic space) is a space, which is protected from the public gaze. By bringing a private space, where she involves herself with the production of her designer clothes as well as the paintings, for the scrutiny of the public, she destabilizes the viewer’s gaze by leaving him or her with no anchor for justifying his/her gaze.

In this installation project titled ‘Lyrical Abstractions: A Room of/for Muses’ Shelly Jyoti converts the gallery space into a private room with neatly arranged flower vases, glass tables and her working paraphernalia as a designer. Two Body Objects, perfectly shaped human torso forms used by a designer to test her clothes, constitute the central theme of the private room. One body object is covered with a designer cloth (designed by the artist herself), which spills over to the floor. Just behind this embellished object one could see a set of paintings that shows abstract paintings and faces of angel like muses. These images of muses were a starting point for the artist and they soon grew into forms that could accommodate the ‘sisters’ who are around her and double up themselves as her muses. Shelly Jyoti, through these ‘muses’ acknowledges that she owes a lot to the general ‘sisterhood’ for becoming a strong professional woman.

Towards the centre of the room, there is another body form donned with a beautifully designed dress that resembles the patterns of the abstract paintings that one sees on the opposite wall. Interestingly, this particular dress material is created out of painted canvas. By the third wall of the gallery/room one could see a shelf with the paintings hung on dress hangers as if they were neatly displayed suits. The front of wall of the gallery/room is turned into a window shopping arena, where mannequins are made to stand with alluring dress materials on.

In this multiple inversion of the logic of a gallery space, Shelly Jyoti raises a few questions and also engages the viewer with the very aspect of viewing. First of all, the artist addresses the issue of the public’s access to the private space of a woman. By the literal re-creation of the gallery into a private room or an upper class boutique, the artist makes the viewer to take his/her own courage to enter into that space. Socio-cultural factors and economic categories (of the public/viewer) come into play when the issue of accessibility presented as a problem and as a solution. The onus is now on the viewer to negotiate his/her entry into the created space.

An artist who uses clothes and canvas as her surface and medium of expression, by subverting the logic of materials creates two different dress items/suits, w hich even in their alluring best turn out to be dysfunctional. Shelly Jyoti probes into the use value of the clothes and a painting by creating a painting/sculpture with a fabric and a cloth with a painting. The fabric that one sees on the first body object spills over to the floor and makes the viewer aware that it is not done for any particular body. While the other body object carries a well knit suit that simulates the paintings on the wall and in fact is made of canvas. In this case too, the notion of functionality is disturbed.

Shelly Jyoti brings in the element of fun and play in her installation by hanging a few paintings in a shelf. These are interestingly titled ‘Small’, ‘Large’ and ‘Extra Large’ reminding the viewer of their consumeability. For viewing those paintings one has to physically move the paintings within the shelf as if it was a piece of suit. The physical involvement of the viewer with these works brings the aspects of choice, selection and selective gaze into play.

‘Lyrical Abstractions: A Room of/for Muses’ is an act of subversion done skillfully within the mainstream aesthetic discourse. It has a camouflage function as it pretends to re-present something and in reality actively questions the very notion of representation. Shelly Jyoti not only brings a private space into the public realm but also collapses the differences between the public and private for furthering the issues of women in professional and creative situations. She reclaims a space for the ‘artist’ woman within main stream aesthetic discourse, even when she operates well in another area of constructive profession.


JohnyML