“She was intensely sympathetic. She was immensely charming. She was utterly unselfish. She excelled in the difficult arts of family life. She sacrificed herself daily”

Usha Seejarim presents Angel of the house, her second solo exhibition with SMAC Gallery. 

“She was so constituted that she never had a mind or a wish of her own, but preferred to sympathize always with the minds and wishes of others. Above all, I need not say it, she was pure.”

The obedient angel of the house. Maintaining familial peace and order. Humble. Sinless. Patient. Reverent and joyful —flying and serving. Flying and serving.

Told through iron casts, steel plates, wire, pegs and broom heads, Seejarim’s Angel of the house is a complicated story of womanhood —the selfless, sacrificial woman whose purpose is to serve, comfort and care, only to be disregarded and abused in a society that denies her social and economic equality. The exhibition examines feminine interiority from the vantage point of a phantom being, whose existence is conjured up through a society that places unbearable demands on its women. The angel of the house is an idealized version of the perfect woman, who knows and accepts her place in the world. This phantom figure continuously looms over the public imaginary. 

Seejarim evokes Virginia Woolf (through her seminal speech-turned-essay “Professions for Women” (1931)) who in turn evokes Coventry Patmore’s problematic yet culturally significant poem, Angel in the House. Woolf, ofcourse, recognised the oppressive spectral presence in her own house, not only as of the external forces of patriarchy and misogyny but also as the internal thoughts and fears within herself, fuelled by attitudes of a hostile society. Through a layered invocation, Seejarim questions and problematises the conditions of existing as a woman in the world. Through the exhibition, womanhood implicates others —- those that relate in joy, those that bring pain and those that depend on the woman for their survival. 
 

Angel of the house furthers Seejarim’s interest in concepts of gendered labour where she reinterprets everyday tools and objects as a means of exploring rituals of domesticity. The element of play and experimentation often found in her practice, courses through the exhibition at varying moments, particularly with the wire works depicting various versions of the family (e.g children at play) as well as through colourful mosaics offering a moment’s reprieve through a merging of colour and form. The mosaics offer us a view into the fullness of Seejarim’s practice, which functions both inside and outside the white cube, through modalities that allow her to engage public artworks and community based public art projects.