Selected work: Serinitya
The basic context of this piece was exploring a new spiritual endeavour after an unforeseen event.
On October 2016, I met in a car accident, fortunately for me I had no life threatening injuries. However, passed several days lead to an unraveling of unfortunate events. Events that took a tole on my well being. There were days that were really rough and there days that were just quite. The event encompassed me I questioned myself who am I? Why am I here? With all these questions in my mind I didn’t know what to do or why I felt what I was feeling. It was then one day, when I got back to walking normally that I caught the smell of something I recognised, back from home. The scent was an incense stick from a shop close by it reminded of something my grandmother told as I child – “When all hope is lost try and talk to god.”
Now I was raised Hindu and have lived around different religious practices but I never really believed in any of it due to the fact that religion has been tied to politics where I’m from. However, I wanted to see if I could build a connection between the religious beliefs that I was brought up with, and the course topic Avatar. The concept of avatar is rooted in the secular practices of Hinduism. In the philosophical or theological context an avatar means a manifestation of God upon earth in corporeal form, which can be that of any living being. As an incarnation, God lives upon earth, goes through the same lifecycle as other living beings to resolve some fundamental problems of existence. It is always to set things right, to resolve some problem, or destroy evil. In a way you may consider it an intervention or micromanagement when we collectively fail or when gods fail us to put our world in order.
Buddhism for me was one of the the religions that I always found quite interesting and it was one particular quote by Gautam Buddha that made create avatars of him specifically i.e “In the end these things matter most: How well did you love? How fully did you live? How deeply did you let go?”
In an ideal situation I would like to recreate this piece in an enclosed public space in order to bring about the sense of serenity. I would also like the light in the middle as seen in image above to be lit and apparent all day. Hence, this would require an enclosed dark space.
Foam Board: This material was used to create a raised platform in which the final figure would be placed.
Hand crafted paper: This material was used to create a flower like object. It was also used to control extensive lighting and create a sense of delicacy by having it wrapped around the top most platform.
Gold Paint: This material was used in order to create flow like movement that comes out from the red hand crafted paper onto the black platform. Here, I used a sharpie to create the outlines and then filled them in.
Plexi Glass: With the helps a laser cutter I created cut outs from plexi glass of the figures to create 2D figure.
Torch: This material was used as symbol of spiritual enlightenment where I placed a torch in the middle of the structure .
Glue: I used special acrylic glue in order to place stick plexiglass surfaces and normal glue to wrap the foam board.
I knew that for this project I was deeply influenced by my culture and ethnicity. The work reminded me a lot about several Buddhist Monasteries and temples that I visited in my early childhood, due to the fact that most of the temples had several engravings and sculptures. I also walked around the city and documented the way buddha was represented in different avatars around stores in NYC.