Art is never
the object alone.
Anne-Laure Lemaitre shapes places
where makers and viewers belong.
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 Sri Lankan background—humans, animals, and plants may cohabit unbothered in apparent harmony, what transpires upon closer study is her vital desire to render tangible these inescapable 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.
Shyama Golden’s vibrant paintings do more than look inwards: they collapse infinite layers of visual and metaphorical storytelling into foreign yet familiar, ethereal, open-ended tales. Do beginnings and ends exist? Are we solely defined by fixed contexts, actions initiated between birth and death—too often perceived as one's ultimate inception and epilogue—or is there more to one’s story?
In Too Bad, So Sad, Maybe Next Birth, we embark on a journey through Golden’s deeper sense of belonging. We encounter moments that evoke precise phases of her life, depicted as past worlds, recollections from Maya, a dying ‘beast’ and the artist’s blue Kolam masked, ghillie-suited alter ego, who upon her last breath voices previous realities into existence for all to see. Maya, whose name derives from the Vedic Sanskrit word for illusion, is the bridge, the connector, an actor-narrator, and the key between these distinct aspects of Shyama Golden’s subjective life. Her mystical presence offers a fluid continuity between the many pieces and facets of Golden’s being, stitched together by this narrative rather than an intrinsic, core essential self.
Maya’s mask(s)—slightly different in each painting, and her anonymity, allow her to represent more than Golden alone: she becomes a ubiquitous representation of the grand theater of life.
Each past ‘era’ presented in the show is embodied by a pair of oil paintings: a larger scene and a close-up detail. Each pair was intentionally designed to balance and re-perspective one another. Through these various ‘lives,’ common thread-throughs reveal themselves: how class-based societies create a labor-based system that actively participates in the definition of one’s value and ultimately, identity; how regardless of the moments in time, human experiences remain cyclically similar; how our dreams, aspirations, heritage, experiences, and legacy connect us to unspoken realms.
The exhibition opens on a car crash, which symbolizes both a rupture and a meeting point. By colliding into herself, Shyama Golden—embodied by Maya—pries open a narrative begging a unique yet essential question: is the artist driving the story that is about to unfold, or is she driven by it? This first large-scale painting, from which the exhibition inherited its title, offers a violent encounter in a subconscious world, perhaps the sole way by which the artist might mourn the finality of a painting being the crystalized, imperfect-because-human, version of an inner world of her own.
Agency is a driving force in one’s life but may also trigger dramatic outcomes. Maya’s body is backlit by the car’s headlights, a glowing red wound exposed from her belly. The stories of past lives told by the injured Maya—neither alive nor dead, but more so in a perpetual limbo—hint at the idea that identity isn’t just an alloy of fables we tell ourselves; it’s also rooted in the external forces and contexts shaping and assigning meaning to our stories. Maya, before her collapse, was holding a grocery bag of blood oranges, now spilled and smashed all over the pavement. These innumerable blood oranges, with their own dramatically red insides, call upon us with dark absurdity to the unscalable, infinite suffering of humanity as a whole.
Maya, a sign painter, is actively painting a billboard featuring a portrait of Donna Summer. Not unlike Maya in this scene, Golden used to be a commercial illustrator, often contracted to represent famous women of color in magazines, books, and other outlets. This past work, both meaningful because it furthered representation in an otherwise homogenous society, remained a bit shallow for the artist, who would constantly interrogate our current cultural obsession with fame. But beyond the topic of the billboard, this piece questions the dichotomy between ‘artists for hire’ and ‘fine artists’ and what warrants the acclaim or erasure of a person beyond their skills alone. Hollywood - 1979 acts as often in Golden’s work as a mise-en-abyme, a loop into its own subject and contradictions, outlining the many angles of what may otherwise be perceived as a simple monolith.
In this ‘life,’ the blood oranges are replaced by Red Crowned parrots as a recurring motif. Their presence hints at a regained freedom—their prominent presence in Los Angeles in the wild due to escape from the pet trade.
Maya is now a gardener for the Bevis Bawa ‘Brief Garden’ in Sri Lanka. Bevis Bawa and his brother and creative rival Geoffrey Bawa loom extremely large in Sri Lankan culture. Very tall men, of mixed ethnicity, wealthy, queer, and very talented landscape designer and architect respectively, they left a mark on the country’s culture and imagination.
In the painting, one can see Bevis being served a drink by his butler, while in the foreground, Maya is tempted by foreboding red berries—makeshift forbidden fruit—while collecting Bevis’s cigarette butts. Beyond the iconic Bawa figures, a complex, somewhat colonialist labor system offers a more nuanced understanding of creative genius as a perceived solitary act. In the pendant to Bevis Bawa Garden - 1936, bugs feasting on a rotting jackfruit, hierarchized to match humans in scale, act as a reminder humanity is but another minuscule part of a much greater and complex order.
In this last life, Maya becomes a Mexican-Texan vaquero, pre-American annexation. Golden grew up in Texas and is fascinated by how geographies themselves are subject to constant identity changes. The first vaqueros—precursors to contemporaneous cowboys—were indigenous to the area that is now Mexico and had learned horsemanship from the colonial Spanish missionaries, who themselves were taught by the Moors, or Muslims of North Africa, who colonized Spain in the 8th century. The Vaquero figure’s very masculine energy contrasts with Maya’s downfall to a mundane and unromanticized death in Mexican Texas, 1862, reflecting on the hardships of that era.
The larger painting’s pendant, depicting a bare, ghostly snakeskin, can be perceived as a sign of perpetual renewal and cyclic transformations.
Beyond this profound exploration in vignettes of past selves with their plurality of hidden symbols and connecting points, Shyama Golden constructs a meticulous, overarching story. One that allows for each of us to reflect on our own multifaceted being, which, while distinct, combines into a broader, unified, complex singularity. Myth of My Own Creation and Are You Seeing What I’m Seeing act as these synthetic representations of Shyama’s inner and outer lives, but also our own. We are the sums of our parts, our filtered perception, and our interpretation of personal experiences, continuously deconstructed and rebuilt as we evolve, suffer, and change.
Closing the exhibition, a short film created in collaboration with Paul Trillo and entitled This Isn’t About Me immerses the viewer further into Golden’s perception. A vintage-style theatrical curtain made of the artist’s hair and bangs parts to reveal her perspective driving through a subconscious dimension as various anxieties appear illuminated in her headlights until the collision with Maya occurs. With her dying breath, Maya, an unreliable narrator, pieces together glimpses of thousands of years of their communal existence. Golden then climbs into Maya’s belly, where they unify into a single being who drives off into the “blue hour” of dawn.
In the end, Shyama Golden’s unique talent may lie in how she allows us to relate. To her, but even more so to ourselves. Through her fantastical, detailed universe-building compositions, she invokes the magical, the odd, and the strange, not as unknown entities, but as inherent, intimate parts we each possess.
Photo: Alexander Laurent Rubalcava
Anne-Laure Lemaitre is a curator, writer, and producer based in New York, Paris, and the Nova Scotia wilderness. Her practice begins by questioning a territory: its physical and emotional dimensions, its history, its context, its belonging, before turning to the art it calls for. This orientation has shaped a body of work spanning the most experimental corners of the emerging art world and leading corporations and public institutions.
Many artists she has worked with early in their careers have since gone on to significant critical and market recognition. Those relationships rarely end with the exhibition. For several, she remains a resource: someone to think with, exchange with, workshop with.
For nearly twenty years, she has worked across scales and contexts: from intimate solo exhibitions at artist-run spaces to permanent public commissions, from single-artist career conversations to cultural programs spanning five continents. Her practice is built around the specific rather than the repeatable, treating the space, the institution, the sidewalk, and the online environment each as curatorial material in its own right.
Lemaitre writes regularly about art for catalogues, publications, and for herself. Her writing, whether commissioned or not, tends toward the felt rather than the prescribed: a belief that how we speak about a practice, and what it does to us, shapes how it is seen and received.
Intentional art programs · Site-specific commissions
Curatorial strategy · International practice
Art In Context is a curatorial production practice whose work ranges from international public commissions, corporate collections and multi-venue cultural strategies to ongoing collaborations with artists, brands and cultural institutions.
Every project begins with the same questions: what does this place need, what story belongs here, and who should tell it. That orientation shapes everything from artist selection and fabrication to the logic of how a program holds together in one location or across multiple sites.
Drawing on nearly twenty years of work, Art In Context has built the infrastructure to operate anywhere and at any scale. An extensive network of creative partners allows it to move from a single commission to a coordinated program spanning dozens of sites without losing the specificity that makes a project land. Art In Context works worldwide.