Too Bad, So Sad, Maybe Next Birth

Maya, whose name roughly means illusion in Sanskrit, is my blue Kolam-masked alter ego. Kolam in the context of the Sri Lankan low country is a form of masked theater that depicts various characters and archetypes. The word kolam is of Tamil origin and means costume, impersonation, or guise. This painting depicts my perspective in the aftermath of my car crash with Maya in the subconscious world. In my previous show, I fell through a gopher hole into this alternate version of Los Angeles constructed by my mind, crashed into this character, entered a second portal in her belly, and was reborn out of a tree in the LA river. I wanted to go back to that collision and make this entire exhibition based on the conversation between the two of us after the crash and before the merging. She is backlit by the car’s headlights and has a glowing red wound in her belly. Maya has died many times before but she isn’t either dead or alive now.

Another previous exhibition of mine had the title “Incarnation” which was a play on the words In Car Nation as a reference to American car culture as well as my own act of incarnating the unseen spirits in my paintings, so cars have often been a character in my paintings. Driving in LA feels like a metaphor for a fear of the finality of making decisions and dealing with the consequences. Even the act of making a painting is disappointing when that means it can no longer exist as an imaginary masterpiece in my mind, but instead becomes a real imperfect painting made by a human being.

Maya was carrying grocery bags full of blood oranges which have scattered everywhere. To me these feel like the baggage of past lives. I also used the imagery of blood oranges in my previous show “In My Mind, Out My Mind” because citrus trees are so commonly grown in modern day Los Angeles. After the Santa Ana Winds citrus fruits were all over our streets in Mount Washington, getting run over by cars. The contrast between cheerful exterior and the blood red interior of the fruit also aligns well with the tone of the scenes I’m painting. The image of so many bleeding oranges gives a tone of dark absurdity, like seeing suffering on a scale that has a numbing effect compared to focusing on the suffering of one person.