27. Janna Ireland & Manjari Sharma
Janna Ireland & Manjari Sharma discuss the evolution of their work, navigating the nuances of photographing one’s family, juggling family, career, and patriarchal attitudes towards artists who are also mothers.
Janna Ireland (JI): Thank you for inviting me to do this with you.
Manjari Sharma (MS): It's my pleasure. I have looked at your career and looked at your work for a long time, and it's a pleasure being able to discuss it officially other than all the unofficial times we've been able to chat with each other as friends. Should I start with a question?
JI: Yes, please.
MS: I would love for you to talk a little bit about Milk and Honey, which is the first body of work that I learned about.
Janna Ireland, “Birthday Boy” from Milk and Honey, 2018
JI: Milk and Honey is a sequel to a body of work called The Spotless Mirror, which was my thesis in grad school. For The Spotless Mirror, I was photographing myself at my husband's grandfather's house here in LA in the San Fernando Valley, and just kind of pretending to be this person who lived in this kind of grand home in the Valley with this pool on this tennis court, and dressing myself up to look as though I could be the person who lived there. After my kids were born, I began photographing them there, and thinking of them as people who had a different relationship to the space, as people who were born into a family that has those kinds of resources and just kind of expected them, and thought of them as part of their lives.
It was a continuation of The Spotless Mirror, but also, I hope, something that could stand on its own. That work became Milk and Honey.
MS: What inspired the name?
JI: It comes from the Bible. The Promised Land is described as “a land flowing with milk and honey.”
MS: A lot of this work makes me think of having this outer body experience where you’re looking at yourself as a part of a world that you didn't originally belong to perhaps? I see you stepping into a kind of a costume, so to speak, and playing a role. And your expression in so many of these pictures has a departure from the scene that you are in. I mean, that's what I find really interesting about this work is that I see you almost in conversation with the camera and it feels like you are letting the camera record some kind of a sync missing between what you feel and where you are. But then, you talk about how your children don't have that separation because they were born into it. How do you see yourself communicating about this work to them at an older age?
JI: Oh, that is a really interesting question. As they grow up, I imagine my work will always be something going on in the background that they don’t think all that much about, and then, one day, maybe when they are in their 20s or something, maybe they will have an a-ha moment, and understand that I was trying to talk about class and race and all these other things in this work that they were a part of.
The work that I'm doing with them right now is much more spontaneous. It's more like they're doing something that is interesting or beautiful, and I run and get my camera and try to record it in a way that's sort of natural and doesn't interfere with the activity.
With the older work, Milk and Honey, they don't remember doing it, but we go to see it. We just saw it at LACMA.
MS: And they understand that it's them.
JI: Yeah, but they don't have the memory of doing it, and they don't really know what my intentions are, or what it means. They know that I'm an artist, and that it's art, but don’t really have a full grasp of what my work is, and what their participation means.
MS: Did you feel like you had a sense of belonging in that world, in your in laws home or you didn't?
JI: At the beginning, I didn't, and that's what the work was about. And then, through being there again and again to do the work, I came to know the people in the family more, and then I felt a sense of belonging.
MS: Interesting.
JI: So we would go to brunch, and then I would take pictures, or we would watch a Lakers game, and then I would take pictures, and I just became part of the family through these pictures that started as being about confusion of being part of this family that was so different from mine.
MS: There's this picture where you're looking into the mirror, and you have the mirror that has the ring like all around it, it looks like there's a tear under the left eye. Is that what it is? Is that what I'm looking at? Or is that like an illusion?
JI: I think it's an illusion. That’s one of a few pictures in that body of work that are actually taken at my house while the kids were napping or in bed. That was one of the first pictures, where I was kind of breaking away from the location and trying to figure out how to continue the ideas when I couldn’t be there.
MS: Do you feel like you started in a place of questioning your place and ended in a place of making family with that place?
JI: I think that's true. I think I questioned it at the beginning. I just wasn't confident in myself as a member of this family. Doing the work helped me gain that confidence, not only spending more time with people and forming those relationships, but the way they related to the work and their excitement to see the work, and to see these familiar places interpreted.
MS: How did they respond to it?
JI: Someone asked me a really interesting question the other day about the way that the work sort of points to the strangeness of certain parts of the lifestyle. There's that tension there, and then also that it's work done in a place owned by people that I love, but it’s pointing to the strangeness of their life. They handled it really gracefully and are really supportive of it.
Janna Ireland, “The Black Suit” from The Spotless Mirror, 2012
MS: I don't see any writings in here about Milk and Honey. Is there an artist statement where you state that awkwardness or confusion that you felt in the transformation?
JI: The statement for Milk and Honey is pretty short. With The Spotless Mirror, because it was my MFA thesis, and I had to generate writing about it. I ended up feeling like I explained too much of it, and I didn't let the work sit on its own. For Milk and Honey, I kind of pulled back in terms of how much I explained to people about what was going on. I want to keep some of that to myself.
MS: Is Milk and Honey done?
JI: It feels done, but it also feels like I could at any time take a picture that fits into it. But maybe that's just the way that I work.
MS: I feel like I'm asking you a question that sometimes annoys me when people ask me. A part of it is also that you are in that adventure yourself– the work is a kind of a call and response. You just never know when you create a piece that might reference itself back to a concept or an idea that you were working on years ago, or maybe, the same piece can find itself in different families sometimes. So I hear you. It's not linear in that way.
JI: What has your dad's experience of the work that you made of your parents been?
MS: It's interesting, because I’ve been taking pictures of my family my whole life. So when he looks at the pictures I made of my parents as my mother progressed through her dementia, I think he maybe recognizes that I'm trying to capture this intimacy between them, but I don't know if he sees it from my perspective. Perhaps he understands it from the perspective of the act that he is lost in. One of the things that I cannot get over is how completely absorbed he is in the act of caregiving. Over the years I have found myself just enamored by this little bubble my mom and dad have created in their own slow universe.
Sometimes when I show him the pictures I find that he notices the very thing he was probably doing in that actual moment. He says, “oh look your mother seems like she has really lost weight in this picture.” I can tell he doesn't notice himself in the picture. He's totally conditioned himself to be checking on mother at all times. What I think is really interesting is that while I’m the artist making the work, I am also a daughter making a portrait of her parents. Papa doesn’t have that duality. Maybe when he sees my photograph he's trying to remember what Mom was potentially experiencing? His life has become trying to think for her, and he functions around guessing what she may need or may not be able to communicate for herself. I hope that work is a book one day, and perhaps in the collection of those photographs he will see something different than what he sees when he looks at an individual picture.
Manjari Sharma, Loss and Resurrection, 2020
JI: It's very difficult to explain to your family what you're doing and what it means when other people are looking at it as art, and what you're going to do with it.
MS: For the longest time when people looked at the work they said, “what are your goals with that work?” I used to find it offensive. I'm not really that type of person who takes offense but I was at odds with trying to look at that work as a “project”. It felt like such a stretch for me to put that work out into the world, and a next level stretch for me to turn it into prints or try to make some aesthetic semblance of the flow. It was a scar that I was willing to share, because I think I was so desperately looking to find a silver lining in that story. And really that whole body of work is my attempt to look for a silver lining, because what's the silver lining in the loss of a parent? All of a sudden my mother’s speech was gone, her mind was gone…. my art helped me make some sense of it. “Mom” has always been my source of inspiration and positive energy, and in some way the work I made of my parents took its place.
JI: What is a family? What are your personal reasons for making that work?
MS: Sometimes the work feels so private and emotional that it feels hard to put it on some kind of a convenient contextual display for the world to interact with. I think work that cripples you in some way, or puts you in a difficult place is where your most meaningful work comes from. So I do think for better or worse, we are like in the business of going towards the very thing that maybe logic wants you to walk away from.
JI: As I've come to know you, I’ve come to know your family, and it has been interesting to look back at your work again, knowing them. For example, look at your shower series and go, “oh, there's Bill,” or I’ll look at pictures that you made when I knew you were pregnant with Nora, and they feel extra special because I know her, too.
MS: Right, as I get to know you, my relationship to your work changes.
JI: Yes. And so much of that is just experiencing your family through your work and then experiencing them as real people.
Manjari Sharma, Untitled, Surface Tension, 2017
MS: That's the beauty of it isn’t it that your boundaries are so blurred as an artist, because you're trying to be the very thing that you are, as completely as you can. You know that your honesty comes from not having a departure from the story you're trying to tell in real life and in art life. However, the world sometimes wants to slot it and peg it, and put your work in different categories. But the fact is that I want to be in the very world that I want to write about, sing about, make work about, because it moves me. I want to photograph those people that I want to have a meal with. It feels very natural. I'm sure all of my family and friend circle, at some point or another, has been dragged into my episodes, but hopefully I didn't make it too difficult for them.
JI: Early on, the work with my children was super staged. And now the work it's more casual. As they're getting older and becoming more and more conscious, it feels like the more respectful way to approach them through photographs–not having them perform in any kind of specific way.
MS: Absolutely. It makes me very proud of those moments. There was this shard of little orange light coming from under my living room door, and I was looking at Nora's little toes going in and out of it, and I was thinking to myself, “Oh, I just wanna run and take a picture of it,” and Nora says “Oh, Mama, don't, you want to take a picture of this?” I felt like I unlocked some achievement right then. Does that happen with your kids?
JI: Sometimes. They can tell the difference between a “serious” work picture and a picture just for the family. Sometimes they will not want to participate. Recently, my younger son was just framed perfectly in this window, but he didn’t want me to take a picture, so I didn’t. Later, when my older son was in the same place, I took the picture, and it became part of a little sculpture. My youngest was so offended! I had to say, “Well, you didn't want me to take your picture, and I respected that. I couldn't make you do it, and that's fine, so, now that is a picture of your brother.” I think that really shifted something inside of him in terms of how he thought about my work and his place in it.
I don't want to do too much. I want to protect them from my desire to look at everything and record everything. I want to make sure that I am not putting too much about them and about our relationship out there.
MS: Ah, yeah, I mean, I think that that's a conundrum, right? Because you are predisposed to wanting to record it all. That’s the artist, and then there's the artist who is the mother, and the mother who is the artist. It's definitely a great conundrum. We've talked about this...how to somehow keep the family's sentiment intact while bringing that camera into the picture is definitely a challenge. But I also feel like if you keep your children only a part of the art making, but not in the other parts of the process, maybe they don't get a full circle of your experience, you know? So bringing them to your shows, or having them read your statements. In my case, Siya, my eleven year old, is reading everything even before I get to it. Siya opens the catalog that comes in the mail and reads what they're writing about me.
JI: I can’t even imagine!
MS: Oh, yea It's incredible. I mean she's obviously read the statement for my parents work, which is a letter to her and it can be read on my website. Sometimes she reads my applications or grants and challenges me. They become little coworkers. Siya can give me feedback, or sometimes she can respond to a photograph with a lot of passion because she’s moved by it, and I take serious note of that. I feel like if they're intermingled in different aspects of your journey then they don't detest the process of creation, because they probably see the full range of how that work they are a part of eventually translates.
It probably gives them a deeper respect for its final iteration…or so I hope. They're young now but who they become changes as the projects develop and age.
Can I ask you a question about Night Season?
JI: Oh, sure!
MS: There's a lot of self portraits. Can you tell me a bit more about that, and where you were when you were creating that work?
JI: Night Season was a body of work that I created specifically to apply to grad school with. When I was in college, I had a work study job to keep myself afloat, and I was there so much that I wasn't able to give as much to my work as an artist. When I was ready to apply to grad programs a few years later, I didn't have a body of work that I felt was strong and consistent enough to apply to programs with. I also had these things I wanted to do that I just couldn't seem to get out, so Night Season was the opportunity to do that. It came right before The Spotless Mirror.
When we talked about The Spotless Mirror earlier, you mentioned something about addressing the camera. If you look at Night Season and then look at The Spotless Mirror, you might notice that in Night Season I'm not looking at the camera, or I am often hidden or cut off in some way. I wanted to be making work that I was a part of, but I was also really afraid to be seen in that work. So much of the direct address of the camera, or the confrontational nature of the work in The Spotless Mirror, and then the work that came after, is a direct response to this older work, where I'm making myself small or hiding myself in some way.
Janna Ireland, untitled from Night Season, 2010
MS: When you look at your bodies of work, do you ever wonder if a particular body of work feels somehow different “visually-speaking” than the previous one?
JI: Your bodies of work feel very distinctive. It feels like mine are messy, or just like, blend and lead into into one another. But with your bodies of work it feels like they are–what's the word I'm looking for? Well, I guess what I want to ask specifically about the Darshan work is how you feel it fits in with the rest of your work because it's so different, visually.
MS: Yeah, I mean it was very central. The stories of those deities, those deities themselves, were very central to my life and my upbringing. I can understand why the subject matter feels different, because Indian gods are a very specific thing. They are iconic in that they have a very strong personality. Like Ganesha, he's a half elephant, half man, traditionally depicted a certain way.
Whether I look at these deities, whose stories I was telling from a very specific lens, or I think of these swimmers from Surface Tension, or the shower work, or even when I was bringing the camera to point back at myself…I'm really thinking of a very crystallized portrait of this moment, or person or story. I see compositionally a lot of parallels in the way I think or create, but in the case of the deities I wanted to bring a certain sanctity to those stories. I wanted to render the work in these very specific colors. Once the first experiment was born, which was the goddess of wealth and fortune, Laxmi, it defined the rest.
For quite a long time I haven't made any more of the deities, but I will be creating a new one coming up in 2024, and that's going to be exciting.
Manjari Sharma, Maa Laxmi, Darshan, 2011
JI: And I am so excited to hear about it!
MS: Yeah, I mean I'm not the same Manjari. So I wonder, what is this one going to look like? I’m starting to see it, and I already see it looking different than the other nine. So what I see in my mind that I have to still crystallize and put into sketch form, and then execute.
For the longest time I said no, I wanted to make these nine, and I made them, and maybe people wanted to see more, or maybe I wanted to see another one, but it wasn't time yet. But I have an institution that's interested in giving me the infrastructure to create the tenth one the way I envision it, and so that's going to be really exciting, and it's slated for 2024. So it's gonna be a minute–thank God–before it's born because it needs some pre-work.
JI: I love thinking about the process of you making those first nine. So it's really fun for me to know that I'll know you when you're making this one. I’ll be able to talk to you about it in real time, and hear what you're thinking. And hear, you know, “this is where I'm getting this costume," and so on. There's just so much that goes into each one. Each one is like a little individual film.
MS: Yeah, it definitely is, and it does have the ability to kind of overwhelm me. Do you feel this way? I mean, I'm curious about your process when you feel like you're completely engulfed by your idea. Do you find yourself in a place of peace, or when you're in production mode, so to speak, which I almost feel sounds like a bad word. But when you find yourself so fully swallowed is it peace or turbulence? Are you destroyed, or are you uplifted? Where are you?
JI: When I am deep into a project, that is when I feel more at peace than any other time. What I have to do is make sure I don't go too deep.
MS: I get that. I feel like it's like a kind of like playing until you arrive at a place where you're flowing. But until the point of peace you're willing to give it every living minute of your day and everything else can evaporate. I love this quote by John Baldessari and he says “You have to be possessed, which you can’t will.”
JI: It has to be genuine.
MS: Yeah, you can't just will it into being. And I think that the voice where you wonder where people would just love it if I made five hundred Darshans for the rest of my life, or the people who love the showers wonder why I’m not doing more. But I cannot stress this enough–because I've had this conversation with other people–if you've signed up for a career where the one thing you're supposed to do is march to the beat of your own drum, and you don't do that, what's the point?
I can tell people are trying to shape their voices based on the voices they hear outside, or they pay too much attention to the noise that's drowning out their own drive to create something unique. I always say, “guard that flame.” You've got that flame that's telling you to do something, and there's all kinds of wind all around you that's going to try to extinguish that. You have to stand by yourself at the cost of maybe losing some “followers,” because if your work has a personality, it's not going to please everybody. But if you're truly making art, and you're willing to claw, and you're willing to go to the next place that your heart wants to take you or your drive wants to take you, then you're a part of that adventure. You can leave the rest to the art historians to figure out.
You're kind of riding a roller coaster of evolution. When Darshan came out of me I was like well…this is not a shower. Darshan turned my life and my very existence upside down. I was pregnant when Darshan began, I birthed a child through it. I thought I was going to get back to doing more work in three months after the baby was born, but that didn't happen. Strangely, while I was still creating Darshan, I also started to create the work on my mom and dad.
JI: I'd love to hear you talk about that. That's something that I like doing, having two bodies of work that are really different going. I didn't realize that you were making those two things at the same time.
MS: People often think making art is neatly buttoned up with a bow on it but it’s not, certainly not for me. I find myself in the act, and then I find myself looking back and studying the act, and finding threads in between them. I probably wouldn't make Darhan if my mom didn't bring the passion she brought to her spirituality, so she’s very intricately tied into it. For her to completely disassemble while my child was coming into the world…I switched to making this very straightforward documentary work of my parents. It was all I could muster up at that moment, and I'm so thankful for it because it became like this shield.
People perhaps wonder how to slot you so they can understand your creative process. Maybe the math doesn't add up in someone else's calculations, but it all makes sense in some mystical way. Maybe that for someone else to find out after I die.
JI: That's something I've been thinking about a lot. I wrote my grandmother's obituary a few months ago. It felt so strange to be interpreting her life and picking out the highlights. I thought, “Should I write my own? Will that make it easier for the people I leave behind?” Or Is it better to not have control over the way people tell your story?
MS: Well, Janna Ireland, don't you go dying on me that’s number one. It’s not allowed. So that's that. And then the second thing is, tell me something you'd want to hear in your obituary. That's a really interesting conversation.
JI: Maybe something like, “she did her best.” What I struggle with, I think, is figuring out how I would balance writing about myself as a person who is a parent and a member of a family, and how to write about my work, because for me they're so intertwined. For the people I'd be leaving behind. I would want to make sure that they felt prioritized in that work, but that it was also true to how I was. I wouldn't want it to read like my CV, but my work is also so important to me that it would have to be a major part of what people talked about when they talked about me.
MS: Oh gosh, I'm having a very feminist response to what you're saying. But, of course your artwork is going to be central to that story and yes, you can be you, and be your art at the same time. I'm getting stronger and stronger about that ownership every day. There are certain things we grapple with, that is not even a question for men. And I don't want to say all of them, but it's not put upon them to make choices between their manhood and their work. But in our case, there's judgment on both sides. And we're both married to pretty modern men who work who equally step up, but still.
JI: At the end of the day, we're still “Mom.”
MS: Oh, absolutely. And maybe sometimes I worry that good men listening to this may not like the way that that sounds. But it's not about what a man imposes, it's also society and culture, and what we as women, from the get go, in subtle or not so subtle ways, are hardwired to take on. Whether it's caregiving for our parents, or the families that we make. Perhaps these conflicts keep us on our toes so we aren’t just drunk on art all the time. I have to say though, discussing or teaching or learning about art is something I can never tire of, ever.
JI: It’s so valuable to have friends who are doing the same thing. That’s what I have in you, as an artist who is around the same age, and also has two children and a ton of ambition and a ton of work that you want to do. Those relationships make it so much better for me.
MS: Absolutely. It was a a breath of relief to be introduced to you and I was, you know, really craving, being around creators who are passionate, and will never stop creating. I love that you have all those same conundrums as a mother of two children trying to navigate that line between how you keep yourself personally satisfied and creatively satisfied. It's hugely comforting that we are not alone. I’m not going to say I always succeed, sometimes I feel regret, like not being able to make my kids play, or not being able to act on a grant deadline.
JI: For me, it's, you know, I can't do the month-long residency. There’s this feeling like I want to be in two places at once, which we've also talked about.
MS: Yes, absolutely. But for all of those roles, the one that brings me the most satisfaction is when I feel like I artistically achieve that which I want to manifest. It has a very individual, independent sense of joy that's free of any other attachment. It's very self-sufficient.
There’s heart bursting joy to see your children do or say things and then you feel that swell, but there's a joint pride in that. You didn't do it alone. That village is definitely important in the shaping of your child. You need that community. You need your spouse if you can manage to have a partner that's cooperative, so it's a shared joy.
JI: But your work is, even when someone is helping you or you're collaborating, an individual pursuit.
MS: Yeah, and that has an unparalleled joy for me, and if I'm too departed from that for too long I will perform poorly in all other aspects. I'm like a bad person when I haven't paid attention to my art. In the last two months I was definitely, completely enmeshed with family, as you know and now I'm back and just starting to pay attention to all of these other aspects of my life. But I haven't seen you for a while, so I can't wait to go out with you and see art whenever that's going to happen next.
JI: We have to make a date.
MS: One question for you before we end this. You just took on a big role at Occidental. Tell me where that brings you as an artist, or how that makes you feel about your practice and trajectory.
JI: I just started a tenure track teaching job at Occidental, and I will be building up the photography curriculum and introducing a bunch of new photo classes in the Department of Art and Art History. I'm really trying to take everything that I've learned from my time as a student and my time teaching in other programs and figure out how to run a little photo program out of this larger department.
One of the reasons that I went to graduate school was that I knew I wanted to teach, and one of the big draws of UCLA was that it really prioritizes teaching for its MFA students. I began to think of teaching as part of my practice, and after I graduated, I imagined I would adjunct for a while. Instead we moved to New York, where I had this awful job running the photography team at a jewelry company, and I didn't start teaching until a few years later. By then, we were back in LA, and I was also working full time in an office at USC. I wanted to teach so badly that I was completely overburdening myself, working full time and commuting and caring for two children, and then teaching classes twice a week from 7-10:30 at night, which, when I think about it now, is ridiculous. That's no way to live.
For so long, I wanted a full-time teaching job, but those are so few and far between. I was at the point where I just thought it would never happen for me, so to not only have that now, but to have the opportunity to shape what the program looks like, and to also have resources at the school to make my own work, like studio space, and the ability to purchase equipment that will help me in my work. I’m kind of overwhelmed with not only having it, but how much more it is than I ever imagined for myself.
So that's kind of where I am–which is all over the place with it. Now the trick will be balancing it and making sure that I’m making enough of my own work to be fulfilled, and making sure that I am paying enough attention to my children and to what they need and really listening to them as they're becoming more and more their own people.
MS: Well, it's a divine problem to have, and I am so excited for you. It's such a great chapter to land on where you're able to solidify these different slots in your life that you have to strike a balance between. I know that that's hard. But a lot of people don't even get to that point where they have achieved so much in these different spaces and have to harmonize. So It’s such an exciting new chapter and I'm here for you on all counts.
JI: I'm here from you and I'm so excited about your classes at Art Center, and I can't wait to have conversations about the work that you want to do with your students.
MS: I'm really looking forward to that.
Janna Ireland is an assistant professor in the Department of Art and Art History at Occidental College. Her photographic work is primarily concerned with the themes of family, home, and the expression of Black identity in American culture. In 2016, she began photographing structures designed by legendary Black architect Paul R. Williams. A collection of 250 of these photographs was published in a monograph entitled Regarding Paul R. Williams: A Photographer's View, in 2020.
Ireland’s photographs are held in the permanent collections of institutions including LACMA, the Nevada Museum of Art, the California African American Museum, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, and the Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College Chicago. Her work has been the subject of articles in publications including The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Harvard Design Magazine, and Aperture.
www.jannaireland.com @jannaireland
Manjari Sharma is born and raised in Mumbai, India and now calls Los Angeles her home. Sharma is a visual artist and art educator that makes work addressing the issues of memory, family, identity, multiculturalism, and personal mythology. Manjari's project 'Darshan,' a photographic re-imagining of deities, garnered her wide critical acclaim and was published as a part of a limited edition book series with Nazaraeli Press in 2021. In 2017 the Metropolitan Museum of Art commissioned Manjari to create a collaborative series favorably reviewed in the New York Times by Art critic Roberta Smith and has traveled to the Louisiana Museum of Art in Denmark and Kunsthalle Mannheim in Germany. Her works have benn recognized by The New York Times, Vice Magazine, CNN, LA Times, The Huffington Post, and can be found in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Carlos Museum, Emory University, and Birmingham Museum of Art amongst various private collections.
www.manjarisharma.com @manjee
