Dream Chasers
Prajakta Potnis. |
The works of Prajakta Potnis, if you chase her own words, could be understood in a single phrase; they are the ‘interpretations of dreams.’ Then it sounds too Freudian. One has to look for case studies, for repressed desires and residual aspirations deposited in the realm of her subconscious. That would look too crude, considering the sophistication of her visual expressions. Obviously this artist looks for the collective unconsciousness of the society. Does it posit her into an arena of Jungian thoughts? Or does it make her a more poetic and autobiographically pepped up interpreter of maladies? She frames the social maladies and these societal monstrosities come to her in the form of ‘aspirations and desires disguised as dreams’.
Prajakta Potnis, while explaining her works makes it clear that these are the days when everyone is making his or her dreams a reality. This becomes all the more pertinent in the case of the artists. Here are one set of strugglers who had dreamt a different dream but destined to have realized an entirely different one. Now Prajakta, who is separated from a generation of struggling artists, looks out for those dreams that define the kind of realities, aspirations and desires. Her works are the vehicles of desires, loaded with interpretational possibilities. In Nancy Adajania’s words, “the objects that Potnis paint can suggest uncommunicative, ephemeral, floating chimeras; objects enveloped in a muted skin of paint, a seemingly planed-down surface that holds down the discontents that seem to bubble beneath and which express themselves in the disquietude that provides these apparently still and soundless paintings with their insistent ground note.”
‘Discontents that seem to bubble beneath’ is a key observation that opens up a doorway even to the latest works of Prajakta Potnis. These discontents are not those of the artist. She transports them into the larger and immediate reality of the ‘maximum city’ where she dwells. A society makes certain demands on a person, Prajakta feels, and living up to those demands and expectations curtails all the hopes of freedom. It engenders insecurities. And these insecurities are expressed in terms of societal acts, which is popularly called ‘the social life’. Prajakta, for me, is looking out for the insecurities of those people who were the preachers of freedom once.
(Consumerist) objects are the proxy manifestations through which the young and the adult human beings act out of their social standing and cover up their insecurities. While talking about the mid-twentieth century toy industry of France, Roland Barthes in his anthology of essays titled ‘Mythologies’ observes that the adult world considers the young children as their miniature proxies and provides them with the miniatures of the things that they enjoy, like the war machines. I am reminded of the ‘mini-me’ in the famous film series titled ‘Austin Powers’. In a way, it is an attempt to act out and trivialize the social fears and insecurities. Prajakta too finds a similar strategy to explicate her thought process. She paints those objects, like trophies, furniture, bouquets; the mute embodiments of achievement, recognition and appreciation, which Adajania qualifies as objects, ‘permeated by a strange sense of stillness and soundlessness.’
Graduating from paper to canvas and from there to corrugated sheets, Prajakta shows her aesthetic choices. Corrugated sheets are used generally for protecting brittle and fragile things. Interestingly, the corrugated sheet itself is a fragile material that ‘crumbles from within’ if it taken out of the packaging scheme. Prajakta paints the images of houses, cars, scooters etc on these corrugated sheets as if she were trying to underline the fact that the objects of security (house, car, scooter and the very corrugated sheet itself) are as fragile as the brittleness of the medium. One is reminded of a sculptural work done by Sumedh Rajendran titled ‘Maximum Slum’ (in the show Paper Flute) where he made a large drain pipe transforming into the rear side of a pig, out of rolls of corrugated sheets. Perched on this pipe there sits a house (a shack) again made of packaging materials. These artists obviously share the same wavelength.
In her latest series titled ‘Praise’ and ‘Perishables’ Prajakta vivifies her thoughts on social fears. I find another analogy that Adjania used to locate Prajakta’s works in the context of ‘objects’ very interesting. She draws a parallel between a dreaming child in its deep slumber with the general mood of Prajakta’s works. I would like to take off from there to say that Prajakta looks at the ‘oral’ and ‘anal’ phase of the child where the child comprehends and rejects the ‘world’ through eating and defecating. In ‘Praise’ the artist brings this aspect, perhaps unconsciously. Prais(ing) is a social vehicle through which the achievements are lauded and appreciated. This is the medium through which the recognition manifests. Recognition, whether is in the form of giving or receiving, is a medium to comprehend the world. And its other end is rejection. There is a constant dialogue between this oral intake and the anal discharging (of the society) that facilitates the human being to be comfortable within the society. Prajakta, in her works tries to evoke the relationship between the oral and anal phases of the human development.
Desires when articulated in metaphors become poetry. Fears, when traverses through the garden of metaphors become not desire, but flowers, carnivorous flowers, for Prajakta. Apparently innocent looking flowers as seen in her works, in reality are carnivorous in nature. The artist has taken a special fascination for these flowers. These ‘vicious’ flowers are metaphorical stand in for the ‘putrescent innards’ (C.P.Surendran) of the ‘normal social beings’. They are desirous in their innocent. But inside the petals (four walls) their ‘monstrous gratifications’ are played out. Here, she does not transform the desires into poetry. They become violence coated with the colours of poetry; the discreet charm of the social hypocrisy.
Prajakta’s works intend to reveal what lies beyond the keyhole. Like the anxiety ridden voyeur in Moravia’s novel, Prajakta’s artistic self functions as an urban rover who peeps through the chinks, which could be called ‘happenings’. She chances upon crime (as in Hitchcock’s Rear Window), chances upon life (like the world of Fagin created by Dickens) and chances upon perfectly played out familial dramas (as seen in the Sivakasi Calendars for the Murphy Radio). Once she had used the digital print of her own midriff to ‘spot’ the voyeurs (HEAT, 2002, curated by JohnyML and Mrinal Kulkarni) and those works did bring the voyeurs out from their skins. Low waist jeans became fad many years later.
Middle class homes in Mumbai, with aspiration levels soaring high might be thinking about changing their wall colors from pale blues and pale pinks in order to challenge an artist like Prajakta because she has learned about the colors from those walls. Now she has become an usurper of their desires. Perhaps, Prajakta would satisfy their ego by painting huge murals that would emulate the unintended design, which is otherwise called ‘water proofing’ on all the residential blocks in Mumbai. Prajakta in her real and artistic selves is a show stealer. And she steals people of their hypocrisy and renders them naked to see their primal insecurities.
(an essay by JohnyML) |
