Shyama Golden’s Demons

By Pramodha Weerasekera
January 10, 2025
Profiles

For Sri Lankan American artist Shyama Golden, self portraits are a visual language. Through them, she is able to unveil herself beyond conventional demographic and geographic identity markers. My first encounter with her was in 2023 at an artist talk I had organized at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Sri Lanka. As graphic designers raved about the detailing and architects raved about the composition of spatial structures in her work, I kept wondering about the narrative methodology Golden used, particularly in her adaptations of demons from Sri Lankan mythology and ritualistic practices.

Golden’s original reference points for the demons were the wooden masks that tourists and diasporic Sri Lankans like her own family often purchase to remember their connection with the island. She uses these demons as a unique narrative visual language to self-reflect about place, vulnerability, and belonging.

One of the first demons Golden was drawn to for inspiration was Mahasona. The diptych Rooms from 2018 depicts herself as the 122-foot-tall demon of graveyards. Bearing the head of a bear, its four eyes can afflict illnesses like cholera or dysentery on its victims, crushing their shoulders, and possessing them. Golden’s partner is depicted as Reeri Yaka, who is the second most powerful demon in Sri Lankan mythology. Typically shown with a fiery, red-skinned human body and the head of a monkey, there are 16 apparitional versions of Reeri Yaka that can condemn people to blood diseases and hemorrhage.

Golden and her partner appear as these demons in the bedroom and living room of their Brooklyn apartment, attending to quotidian activities. The highly detailed neighborhood atmosphere of claustrophobic yet luxurious high-rises surrounded by rats and stray cats add to an overwhelming feeling of alienation as Golden tries to peel off her South Asian skin along with her emotional vulnerabilities in Brooklyn.

When asked about her use of masks, whether of mythological demons or her own creations, Golden describes a need to understand herself through her own characteristics. While the ritualistic, the afterlife, and cityscapes continue to be external forces that define her, she remains more interested in the internal forces within her. Golden’s pluralistic, infinitely layered approach to the self is reminiscent of the postcolonial woman described by filmmaker and writer Trinh T. Min-ha in her 1989 text, Woman, Native, Other. Min-ha writes, “‘I’ is […] not a unified subject, a fixed identity, or that solid mass covered with layers of superficialities one has gradually to peel off before one can see its true face. ‘I’ is, itself, infinite layers. Its complexity can hardly be conveyed through such typographic conventions as I, i, or I/i.”

Golden’s work reflects this notion of an unfixed identity. Through her work, she is on a quest of discovering the infinite layers within her current, previous, and future versions of self via a visual, narrative language of painting. In her 2022 series, “Incarnation,” Golden presents herself as a more self-confident figure that tries to confront Mahasona while self-identifying with him at the same time. Originally displayed at the Miki Meng / Friends Indeed Gallery in San Francisco, the series sees Golden confronting the demon in a graveyard, car park, forest, hill, and lake against the Los Angeles city skyline, reflecting her recent move from New York City.

In her latest series “In My Mind, Out My Mind” (2024), shown at Harper’s Chelsea in New York this past June, Golden took on a new challenge of developing a mask of herself. Part of a narrative that includes many lives, the blue mask parodies the irony of her seeking a fixed identity despite knowing that such concepts are constantly in flux, constructed and reconstructed over time.

—Pramodha Weerasekera is an art writer based in Colombo, Sri Lanka. Her writing has appeared on multiple platforms including Art Review, e-flux, Hyperallergic, and STIRWorld.

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