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Installation view: Metaphorical Mathematic, 2003.

Pooja Iranna's sculptures and paintings revolve around urbanization and present a strong commentary on how humans have exploited the land and surpassed all limits of intruding into the ecological balance. Through her works she focuses on the ever expanding cities with the structures rapidly coming up thoughtlessly, very strikingly articulating the urban degradation. In her work, Pooja presents manmade structures that talk of humans as an entity, their presence, articulations, and psyche without their physical presence. Her works capture the city as a phenomenon as we experience it.
 
Pooja uses a variety of mediums to express herself, from the much delicate drawings, video, photography, installations to very solid cement and staple pin sculptures. The architectural forms, lines and texture play a pivotal role in Pooja Iranna’s practice. They elucidate the personality of these structures, not as catastrophes, but as evocative of human ability of creating habitations. The elegant geometric lines and forms playfully touch the viewer's senses with the way they articulate the scale, distances and familiarity. Material she chooses to construct her structures thoughtfully manifest in lines and forms. The lines, forms and textures interconnect like the web. The material and scale present, both, fragility and strength.  “My choice of medium is guided by my thinking, reasoning and understanding of what I wish to express. Working with different materials but using the same underlined expression gives me a sense.” says Pooja. 
 
This body of work by the artist has been selected from her art practice over a decade. The aspect of urbanization she touches upon is very much relevant to the current times of crisis in the eco imbalance and the fall outs of the anthropocene.

Proposed Drawings, 2017-2019, ink on polyester film, 8 x 11.5 inches (each).

Proposed Drawings, like blueprints used by architects, show elevations of envisioned structures. These drawings comment on the ever expanding urbanism and overwhelming presence of structures throughout the globe. The webbed structures here do not intimidate the viewer. Pooja presents them through fine abstraction of lines and forms. The structures manifest elegantly in a fluid fashion exposing their skeletal bare inner-side. The lines are employed in a beautiful manner with gradations of tones that gives dimensionality to the otherwise linear rendering.

Pervasive Mushrooming 7, 2019, cement, colour, staple pins, 15 x 11 x 2 inches

This installation talks about, in the artist's own words, ‘how we are just constructing, deconstructing and reconstructing endlessly, without questioning the need and the purpose of this growth’. The installation very thought provokingly shows how, in this process of expansion, the character and our history is lost. What we are left with are clones all around us. This is a strong take on how the local characteristics are left out in the urbanization project. The pristine cityscapes devoid of any traces of living and the culture of the people. The modern vision of structures, that looks uniform, as though being cloned, also represents how mechanized and monotonous our thinking and lives are. Pooja employs materials like concrete, steel and mirror, the core substances of modern day building construction, to make an alternative assemblage. By playfully employing the miniaturesque format and scale she effectively offers a counter-view to gaze at her own engineering constructs.

Juxtaposed Expansions 10, 2015, pastel and watercolour on acid free paper, 15.5 x 11.5 inches.
Juxtaposed Expansions 14, 2015, pastel and watercolour on acid free paper, 30 x 20 inches.

Pooja brilliantly plays with solidity and fluidness of structures in these works on paper. The grids interlock and intersect while interspersing with the background and foreground. The perspective offers a monumental gaze at the structures. The dense assembly of structures suggestively comes across as either the process of construction of the sites or destruction. This ambiguity is key to Pooja’s thought process that revolves around the chain of constant building-rebuilding processes we have embarked upon.

Unremitting Expansion 1, 2013, digital print on Hahnemuhle museum etching paper,
36 x 72 inches.

Pooja has generously taken to photography, which according to her helps her in capturing the modern and contemporary architectural spaces. She takes random images and digitally reworks and sometimes works with different materials after printing. The photographs, contrary to her paintings and sculptures, inevitably capture such details which would otherwise be selectively incorporated by the artist. The urban chaos, disorder, and mess are louder and prominent here. Pooja superimposes the congested buildings with images of rows of bricks. The work complicates the notion of urban development and the exclusion of the unprivileged.

A Thousand Thoughts to Build and Only One to Bring Down, 2004, acrylic and cutouts on digital prints, 46.5 x 35.5 inches each. 

A Thousand Thoughts to Build and Only One to Bring Down created using acrylic and collage cut-outs to create jigsaw-like pieces is a touchy-feely and sculptural composition. The pieces stand out from the surface of the paper making the viewing experience tactile. It speaks about the fragility and vulnerability of the world we are building around us. The grids, a constant element in Pooja’s works, extend as an armature to the human thoughts.

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