To Bad, So Sad, Maybe Next Birth

PM/AM Gallery is pleased to present 'Too Bad, So Sad, Maybe Next Birth', Shyama Golden’s first solo exhibition with the gallery.

Shyama Golden is an artist with an acute understanding of the multitudes we each contain and carry within. Through her paintings, she opens portals into narrative dimensions with evocative, incantational power. Her autobiographical visions touch on the metaphysical, expanding beyond the mundane and anecdotal to seek a boundless universal truth.

Life is never the linear journey we make it to be. It takes sinuous turns; it halts, rushes, and builds from deliberate decisions we make for ourselves, but may just as much be impacted by circumstantial encounters, serendipity, accidents, struggles, and hurdles we face along the way.

Beyond Golden’s luscious and surreal scenes in which Yakas, or masked Kolams—traditional demons and theatrical figures from her native Sri Lanka—humans, animals, and plants may cohabit unbothered in appearing harmony, what transpires upon closer study is her vital desire to render tangible these unescapable cycles we all experience and endure.

'Too Bad, So Sad, Maybe Next Birth'—a saying Golden’s parents would use when an event would go differently than planned, to her dismay—builds upon a visual vernacular carefully constructed by the artist in recent years. Playing with scale and subject, Golden seeds details and subtle cues that evolve from infinitesimal, almost imperceptible hints in certain works, only to predominantly become main subjects later on. This playful constant push and pull echoes throughout her practice, connecting her world beyond the constraint of any one, singular framed scene.