Shyama Golden

Shyama Golden (b. 1983) is a Los Angeles-based artist. She received a BFA in Graphic Design from Texas Tech University in 2004.

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I was born in the US, but I lived in Sri Lanka when I was around 10. In those days, you could see green for miles, jungle everywhere, and you were surrounded by natural beauty. I moved to Los Angeles 5 years ago and it has been influential for my art. In many ways, LA has that same connection to nature that I miss about Sri Lanka.

LA also interests me because it feels like a constructed, theatrical world. Almost everything in LA is brought in or imported from somewhere else to create the LA version of the American dream. The peacocks, palm trees, bougainvillea–everything LA is known for–were brought here by settlers to create an exotic paradise with no specific reference point.

The theatricality that I use in my paintings is also grounded in my Sri Lankan roots. My work involves many magical and fantastical elements. One important object in my work is the Sri Lankan mask, which I grew up with. Many Sri Lankan households put them above the door to ward off unseen and negative spirits.

There are two kinds of masks worn in Sri Lankan culture. One is for healing rituals and the other is for entertainment. The entertainment masks are used to make fun of different roles in society like the police or monarchs. The healing masks often represent different demons or deities and dancers wear them in rituals to treat mental or physical ailments. During these rituals, the patient is seated on a mat in the middle of the room and is surrounded by a healer, drummers, dancers, and the entire community. In a weird way, that’s what being an artist feels like because you’re painting something you have strong feelings about and require an audience. The practice feels therapeutic in a similar way. It’s a lot like a ritual.

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My paintings always start with writing. I have years of notes I can draw from whenever I need inspiration or an idea. I usually combine ideas and draw them out in thumbnail storyboards. I'll sketch these images in a few different ways until I'm happy with the composition, then I'll consider how each piece looks next to the others in the series.

There are so many artists I’m referencing when I work, but David Hockney is a big one for me. His work feels like theater and his figures and backgrounds feel staged, even if they are landscapes. In my work, I often add elements that feel theatrical, staged, or artificial, because I love creating a world that is aware of itself as a creation. For example, for some of the self-portraits, I paint the pose stiff or in a perfect side profile, much like old portraits where the sitter had to hold a pose for hours. It shows an awareness that I know I’m constructing this world and this figure.

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In my series, In My Mind, Out of My Mind, color functions like a code. The green represents being in my conscious mind. In the green paintings, I wanted to ground the viewer in my reality of living in LA, so I added features of the LA landscape, trash, and gopher holes. The gopher holes are ignored elements of LA landscapes that act as portals into the blue paintings.

The blue symbolizes that you've entered my subconscious mind. I sometimes depict cars and driving in my work, because they capture American and LA culture, but also represent my real fear of driving. I imagine that these anxieties exist in my subconscious world as well. In one of my blue paintings, I’m driving and I hit a giant masked version of myself, this yakka, which is a trickster character from Sri Lankan folklore.

I see all of these masked and unmasked figures as different versions of the same person. They exist simultaneously or within each other. One way to look at it is like a shadow self or an alter ego. If you try to suppress parts of yourself, they grow. This yakka has grown to a giant size, and I dive into its belly into this red world, even further past the subconscious mind. In this narrative, I’m dissolving who I am for a moment and being reborn.

The viewer doesn’t necessarily have to understand the specific journey I’m taking, but I wanted the color code to express a journey through the different levels of my mind. I was making speculative fiction about my subconscious mind, since I can never fully access it. I like to think of it as a myth of my own creation, not only as a myth I have created but also as a myth about the creation and recreation of my identity. The tension between real and myth, mesmerizing and unsettling, is what interests me.