Important Notice

Justin Ponmany’s body of work speaks of age and dislocation, each canvas encrusted with the narratives of people and places that have been pushed aside or left behind in the name of urbanization and development. Living and working in the megacity of Mumbai, the artist`s images are borne from the many contradictions and crossings of the city, including those between the personal and the public, the individual and the industrial, stagnation and... Justin Ponmany’s body of work speaks of age and dislocation, each canvas encrusted with the narratives of people and places that have been pushed aside or left behind in the name of urbanization and development. Living and working in the megacity of Mumbai, the artist`s images are borne from the many contradictions and crossings of the city, including those between the personal and the public, the individual and the industrial, stagnation and regeneration. Ponmany’s images are gritty, peeking through holes in slick holograms to reveal parts of the city’s underbelly, in an attempt to understand and relate the paradox that is the postmodern moment.

Ponmany has also incorporated the gritty and industrial in his creative process, using materials ranging from epoxy, resin and hologram to printer’s ink and photocopied images. Reflecting on his practice, Abhishek Hazra explains that the artist “…has always attempted to engage a dense dialogue with technology – or more precisely with technology refracted through the granularities of our cultural habitus. Even as a student in Bombay’s JJ College of Art, he was more interested in practices of mark making that openly proclaimed their allegiance to technological mediation than pristine surface wrought by a ‘dexterous’ hand. Much before the present ‘ubiquity’ of digital technologies in imaging processes, Justin was trying to explore, through dizzying cycles of iteration afforded by relatively cheap forms of photo-mechanical reproduction like photocopiers, the ways in which the apparent fixity of a given image could be ruptured…these tensions between the organic and inorganic, between embodied experience and technological mediation have continued to inform his practice in multiple ways” (“The Alchemy of Vitality”, Justin Ponmany: Dedicated to My 20s, Nature Morte and Bose Pacia exhibition catalogue, 2007, p. 52).

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