Exploring Modernity: An Interview with Jeremy Sharma
In this conversation, the renowned conceptual artist delves into his latest exhibition, Cipher, and reflects on the evolving role of art in a digitally interconnected world.
Jeremy Sharma is a conceptual artist renowned for his multifaceted approach to painting and beyond. His practice dissects the language of painting as a medium, surface, and object, while traversing the realms of materiality, design, and environment. Through his art, Sharma navigates modernism's resonance in today's world, examining the complexities of interconnectivity and our fragmented realities in the digital age.
With a career spanning 20 years, Jeremy has showcased his work in numerous solo and group exhibitions across Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Italy, the U.S., and more. His evolving artistic journey reflects his desire to capture the pulse of a world shaped by technological flux, creative inquiry, and cultural intersections.
In this conversation, we delve into his latest exhibition, Cipher (on display at Appetite, Singapore, until December 29, 2024). Through a digital lens, Sharma captures the pandemic's lingering echoes by transforming the endless stream of online consumption into vivid visual puzzles. His work challenges viewers to reimagine abstraction and figuration in a space where traditional methods meet technological innovation.
Join me as Jeremy Sharma unpacks his process, inspirations, and thoughts on art's role in the digital age, while offering a glimpse into his future projects and artistic philosophy.
Can you talk to me about your current exhibition ‘Cipher’?
It's based on images gathered during the pandemic and it was quite organic because there wasn’t much happening at that time and I was on my computer a lot. I was also working for an exhibition in Australia and even though it was the pandemic, we were just going for it anyway. I couldn't go so much to the studio to work so I had this idea where I wanted to revisit certain things as an artist that I had done before as a student like learning to use Freehand graphic design software.
I really enjoyed working with that particular software because it taught me how to look at art and design very differently through the lens of the computer so there was something about working on my laptop and producing art during the pandemic which was fully digital. Like really, fully, digital so the exhibition is the result of my work at that time.
Can you describe the process you used to create the images in this exhibition?
Basically it’s about consumption, what we consume on the Internet, the things that you read, news, entertainment. Every time I looked at something I’d take a screenshot of it and I’d keep it in an image bank. I’ve done this before with my recent paintings where I’ve processed the images in a very minimalist way but for Cipher it was a little bit more chaotic, more abstract because there were layers of an image that went through a process of extraction.
My work is about turning information or data that you see online into form, shapes and lines and it becomes a kind of visual language. By working with the software, it creates a very different kind of handwriting. It's not quite the same when you're drawing with your hand, I'm using the software instead like a tracing tool to pick out shapes which I then fill with colour and layering. So for me it's another way of understanding abstraction but using a computer or software as an extension of my body.
So I guess AI plays a role in your process to some extent?
Yeah. Because it has its origin here, but I would say it’s pre-Artificial Intelligence. You're looking at how a computer generates or dictates a language or visual language or an artistic language and I was drawn to the fact that it's very graphic, illustrative and very flat. So it is a language, but also an aesthetic. You could describe it as pre digital, an analogue representation of an image because that's my generation, when we were starting to use computers and getting on the Internet, right in in the 90s. It’s really a part of my time and the things I'm looking at back then. So I was nostalgic for that as well.
Your images are like a visual puzzle, leaving the viewer to put the pieces back together again. How do you decide which elements to remove?
I think those are very formal choices and also compositional choices like you're composing a musical piece. It’s a constant process of adding and removing and it all comes together in the final picture. I juxtapose images from very contrasting elements and then I play around with them creating tension, noise or chaos and this gradually becomes abstraction.
Where do you find the original images?
They could be from books, from adverts, old postcards or just images I happen to come across but there's always a trigger point in the image. I think sometimes for me is it's a kind of desire, the image is speaking to me, it desires to be painted. But something happens when you're translating or you're painting. Something shifts because of your own subjectivity and the nuances of your processes. I'm very excited by that process.
Your work hovers between figuration and abstraction. What draws you to this space between readability and ambiguity?
I think someone once said that the greater the ambiguity, the greater the desire. So I think that ambiguous space creates room for imagination. I think if it's too readable it becomes too illustrative but if you go to a space in between you get this zone of imagining. Where it's open to different interpretation.
Can you talk to me about your piece called PSH KR at the exhibition?
The title is a play and reduction of the letters of the Indian city called Pushkar. It is an image extracted from a photo of the pilgrimage city. It is a scene of a camel fair with the water and the landscape, people and minarets in the desert. I bought the photo book after a short stint in Rajasthan to visit some desert musicians. I extracted the image and I thought, this actually kind of looks like a cross between a miniature painting and a carpet. You know, like those copies that you can buy at the shops. I wanted something very suggestive and when you look at that image, you get a sense of a landscape like a desert , I use colour to suggest this too, but when you stand closer to the image, it is completely abstract.
Are you trying to convey a message or make a statement?
No, I try not to impose too much. If people ask where the image is from, I‘ll tell them, but it's more about keeping it quite open to their reading. I think it’s about the potential for what that image was and what it has become and how that creates a different reality, it changes you. That’s what I try to achieve.
About 10 years ago for the Singapore Biennale you created some wall reliefs based on radiographs. How do you approach this transformation of abstract data?
The trigger for that work was a post punk album by Joy Division called Unknown Pleasures. The album cover was a graphic representation of radiographs and the designer, Peter Saville, had based the image on actual data from a scientific journal and turned it into this design that initially looks like a landscape of mountain peaks but became a very imaginative abstract. So I thought OK, why not take this further and collect data from all the different pulsars I can find in our known universe and turn them into artworks.
A pulsar is basically a dying star which is kind of romantic and it’s a process that goes on forever. For millions of years it spins and produces a radiograph that can be read by space stations on Earth. So I collaborated with an Astro Physicist in Manchester which by coincidence is where Joy Division came from and he provided me with the data which I turned into art by taking the numbers or coordinates of each star and I turned them into shapes. And then I used a 3D printing method to create what looks like a wood carving of the images, but on polystyrene foam. That appealed to me because that's something that cannot be done by hand. My work at Cipher is an extension of this but its closer to home which is representative of life during Covid. So I think my work is very representative of life happening around us.
Your work explores the tension between distance and connection, whether it's in far away stars or creating images in through screens. How do you see these themes evolving in your future work?
I don't consciously try to find a thread to my work but in terms of the tension between distance and connection, but I think about that even in recent work. It seems like I’m almost going back in time to painting again but some things remain the same in that I work from images which come from a distant source. They are a connection that comes from our digital world and our interconnected networks.
I want to make works that reflect the conditions of our time and how we actually connect but I think what I'm hoping for is to create an intimacy from an artwork. An intimacy with the artist and that’s a very different kind of connection with the viewer, because you're extracting something from the world and connecting its image to the viewer via the artists hand and that becomes very personal.
Given the rapid expansion of digital media and data in our lives, how do you see your work engaging with and corresponding to the overwhelming presence of information in the modern world?
I think you're right to say that we are living in a world of abundant and overwhelming information, but I think this idea of slowing down is very important and I think art does that. Painting is a long interrogation of just one image so I like that it's something that's extracted from a very fast-paced world and turned into this very slow moving thing. Perhaps in the end, art always has to come back to painting.
What excites you about the possibility of art in today's digital age?
That new technologies afford us new ways of seeing. With every new technology, I consider how I can reflect that back into the canvas. I think I'm quite traditional in that sense but that’s what excites me about tech that sometimes you will find something that triggers a completely new visual, a new interpretation of a question or a situation.
Can you tell me about your curatorial platform ‘bulanujung’?
It’s an experimental curatorial platform. We have a focus on moving images like videos or films or expanded cinema. Because I feel that these are relatively unexplored areas.
Does this influence your creative practice?
Yes in a social and networking sense. It means I get to work with my networks and within the art community and it is an opportunity to show artists who are not so visible. During Covid it was a digital showcase of films and video art by artists that I've selected. Post-Covid I created a show called Nighthawks inspired by the Hopper paintings about the kind of things that happen at night. It ran across two weekends and the whole showcase only happened at night. It was held at Starch (Singapore based arts collective) and was also part of Singapore Art Week (SAW). We created events comprising performances and screenings and we even had an artist that set up a bar so it was very interactive and experiential. Art can be experienced in different ways; it can be engaging and fun.
You've exhibited internationally and domestically, and you've had various residencies across the globe. How have these experiences impacted your artistic approach or perspectives of the art scene in Singapore?
In terms of residencies and shows overseas, it has helped because I think when you travel and you get out there, it definitely gives you a very different perspective of your own art as well as how the how the rest of the world thinks. You realise we are all conditioned politically right through our education. It determines how we think and what kind of art we make. So I think when you start to understand the world more you also understand the context of being in Singapore.
Singapore is quite conservative, even when its progressive, and I think we all know about its censorship laws and what we can't do and what we can't say and I'm very aware of that as an artist, so I think local artists tend to self-censor and navigate around the issue. As a result, we have ways of making work that feels very Singaporean.
When you're given a certain set of parameters, you have to work within guidelines and that generates all sorts of creativity. It can also dictate the genre or the medium that artists use. For example, my recent works are more figurative and my paintings deal with some risqué subject matter so it's my way of confronting what I want to do as an older artist. In some ways the earlier modes of abstraction weren’t enough for me. I want to try something different and to address other kinds of things in my external and inner world. I also recently released a book about films in Singapore called Slander!, and I think that's also my way of navigating a political landscape through cinema. I use cinema as a vehicle to talk about things that we don't talk about, but I also use it in a very diaristic format so it has myself in it too.
Do you have any upcoming projects or exhibitions?
Yes in January, I am involved in Art SG fair with Haridas Contemporary, a paper residency project and a group exhibition on painting at the ADM gallery.
In the summer, I am doing an artist residency in Europe and towards the end of the year I will be working towards a solo exhibition of new paintings with my gallery.
Contact:
Instagram: @jeremysharma1 @jeremy_sharma_paintings @bulanujang
Facebook: Jeremy Sharma Studio
Website: www.jeremysharma.com
