The Thin Red Line: Garima Jaydevan

Shubhalakshmi Shukla

Each work by Garima Jaydevan, each repetition re-discovers itself not only in subject but also in its objectivity. Shubhalakshmi Shukla successfully attempts to explore the subtle mystery in each of her works.

Mumbai based artist Garima Jaydevan’s significant work ‘It all happened in a moment’ was shown at the muchdiscussed show A4 Arpel. Garima chose to emphasize the scale ‘A4’ within which several large scale construction projects were conceived on the computer screen as a premonition. Garima accommodated the view from her window-of Mumbai city, as totality of this work envisaging the ‘invisible’ viewer behind the window space. In the framed space of Garima’s work , each A4, a mass scale repetition, is a cluster of buildings-residential complexapartment houses; however, she divides the horizontal plane into half and flip reverses the landscape. More correctly, it is like a reflection in the mirror creating a simile through the ‘upside down’ city. This lived insignia of the metropolis – Mumbai is claustrophobic and yet a liberating space, the photographic work provides an entry into her more subtle and conscious works. Garima often employs mirror in her works. The mirror- is a screen and yet a panoptical illusion, a narcissistic yet a self-reflexive space to unfold one’s perception. Garima employs the pieces-of-mirror; cut into small triangular shapes juxtaposed with a plane mirror in two equal halves, work (Untitled) wherein the self appears to be complete in one half and fragmented in another half. The fragmented image is finely divided by a bloodline that runs in between the small-broken-image-of the self. Garima chooses to continue with the thin red line signifying blood in her other works too. Graima makes ‘repetition’ instrumental in her language. She prefers to voice out the unsaid- said; that each individual is born ‘unique’ yet trapped in more or less similar circumstances. In her works each individual existence on this earth has a value, a reason to exist and besiege. May it be a row of flowers, a row of petals or a row of dots (the point from where the ovary rests). Garima often acknowledges coexistence of this animate and the non-animate world’s minutest (subatomic) and the largest (cosmic) as a poignant content. I feel, in Garima’s works, a dot signifies the subatomic particle, a geometrical entity, a beginning, an individual and God. Garima perceives a ‘dot as a dot’ and a ‘line as a line’ and keeps a divide in between. Often opaque blank colors are like threedimensional color- spaces as in Mondrian. The lines and dots move from one color-space into another. She marries the repetition of dots and lines in several of her works.

A line of dots rhythmically taking off from the rows of lines, a line of dots entering from light to darkness or vice versa; a line of dots in one half and a row of lines in another, and so on and so forth. This allows her to seek lines and dots with/in textures, which she distinguishingly identifies and filters separately and arranges in separate halves in her works. Consequently she makes a critique of Paul Klee’s statement, which I paraphrase as- when a point goes for a walk it becomes a line, and when a line goes for a walk, it becomes a plane. Paul Klee’s statement conjoins abstract elements to create an architectural volume, whereas Garima daringly segregates each element and takes the existence of the dot beyond any architectural space.