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 her ‘secondary interest’, which is ‘natural’ to her making, that is her gendered self.

When the art created by a woman is dubbed as ‘secondary interest’, 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, which 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

March 2007