A Portal To Something New: Shyama Talks Rebirth, Mythology, & Painting Dream Logic
Shyama Golden (b. 1983, Texas, USA) is a Sri Lankan-American artist based in Los Angeles whose work merges figurative realism with elements of South Asian mythology to create surreal, symbolic narratives. Drawing on her background in graphic design and a decade-long career in commercial illustration — with clients ranging from HBO to The New York Times — Golden’s paintings explore identity, memory, and cultural hybridity through a distinctive visual language.
Her recent exhibition, 'Too Bad, So Sad, Maybe Next Birth', took its title from a phrase her parents would use when things didn’t go as planned, and centers on themes of reincarnation, fate, and transformation. At the heart of the series is Maya, Golden’s masked alter ego, who reappears across eras and settings, embodying her interest in the cyclical nature of life and the shifting boundaries between past and present as well as between myths and the 'self'. The artist and I recently spoke about rebirth, mythology, and painting as dream logic in her creative practice.
Your recent exhibition ‘Too Bad, So Sad, Maybe Next Birth’ features Maya, your masked alter ego who appears across different eras and identities. Could you tell us how Maya first came into being as a character and what inspired you to use her as a narrative device to examine the complexities of fate, personal agency, and the cyclical nature of life and death?? What does Maya represent for you, and how does she help you explore broader, collective experiences of identity and transformation?
Maya represents the part of me that is hidden from myself most of the time, similar to what Jung would have called the shadow self but less about repressed desires and more about questioning where desires even come from. She first came into my work as I was looking to get to the bottom of my own insecurities, to understand the things that had prevented me from living as an artist for most of my life. It made sense to me that this character would be able to remember past lives that aren’t accessible to me, she would have all kinds of memories that would be overwhelming for me to hold all at once.
I wanted to go deeper into my own psyche by asking myself, what’s underneath that fear, and then what’s underneath that, on and on. That’s why in the past two exhibitions I explored this narrative of falling through a gopher hole and entering a subconscious dimension, and then falling again into the belly of Maya which leads to the death of one version of me and a rebirth out of a tree in the LA river. I need stories to help me make sense of my own life, so this story helps me connect my life to what is going on in the world at large, which feels like it is collapsing and getting ready to birth something new.
Your work draws from a wide range of sources — 19th-century Texas, 1930s Sri Lanka, 1970s Los Angeles — merging historical settings with mythology, memory, and recurring motifs and symbols like blood oranges and traditional Kolam masks. How do you bring these diverse elements together into a cohesive visual language? Could you elaborate on how these symbols operate on personal, cultural, and conceptual levels within your practice?
The world that’s being referenced here was built piece by piece. The first steps were thinking about the subject matter and how I wanted it to visually look. I have always been fascinated by past lives, and the mask practice of Kolam in the low country of Sri Lanka was a great vehicle to explore the concept as it’s used to depict the interaction of different social roles.
The blood oranges entered the work in the same way that visuals enter dreams, I was eating a lot of them at the time, and the dark red flesh was such a strong visual. Citrus have come to be associated with California, and these were the goth version of sunny fruit, perfect for showing the fragility of life. What makes it cohesive is that I’ve stitched these elements together in service of a narrative of decay and rebirth.
On a personal level pretty much everything comes directly from my life, but then I’m keeping in mind the images that have cultural meaning which I can also use to move the story forward, and conceptually I want to use these elements to talk about identity and rebirth in ways that you might not expect.
Your paintings challenge the notion of life as a linear, fixed story by presenting identity and time as fluid, evolving, and multifaceted. How have your hyphenated life experiences, cultural background, and reflections influenced this approach? What does this nonlinear storytelling allow you to communicate that a more traditional narrative might not? How do you hope your audience will engage with and perhaps reconsider their own understanding of beginnings, endings, and personal histories through your work?
I’m interested in identity, not as a fixed essence or a bunch of labels to live by, but as a narrative that individuals and groups tell themselves. I hope it will make people think about the stories we are given and ask who benefits from them. On a personal level, letting my past selves die, grieving them and moving on, has freed me to keep evolving.
The exhibition ends with your short film ‘Too Bad So Sad, Maybe Next Birth’, created in collaboration with Paul Trillo. What does the title allude to? What drew you to working in film, and how did this collaboration take shape? How do the possibilities of moving images compare to painting or installation for you, and what guides your decision to shift between mediums when building these immersive, symbolic worlds?
The film functioned as a prequel to the paintings, setting up the scene of a car accident in the subconscious world which opens the injury/portal in Maya’s belly. Paul is my husband and an incredible storyteller and filmmaker and we have very similar tastes so it felt very natural to make this film together.
We were also testing some new methods that had never been used before, making custom AI models for the environments and characters using 100 pieces of my work and building the film from those using Paul’s skills and involving some of the talented people he knows to help out. Moving images and sound bring so much life to the ideas in the work and can make the ideas a bit more accessible than a painting.
The current version of the film won’t be released publicly, because it is meant to go with the paintings in the gallery, but we are working on a longer version that everyone will be able to watch.
Looking back at your career so far, how has your visual language evolved? Are there themes you find yourself returning to — or directions you’re eager to explore next?
There have been common threads in my work over the years. I keep coming back to the personal struggle as a microcosm of the changes happening in the world at large. I’m still using my painting as a sort of visual record of my life, but recorded in a kind of intentional dream logic, rather than literally depicting things that have happened to me.
I’m always interested in social dynamics and performance. I will be continuing to work with film and sculpture as these feel exciting to me. One of the cultural changes I’m noticing lately is that people are rebelling against being boxed in by one practice.
An artist can’t just study art, but should follow their curiosity across every field that interests them, and that’s what I hope to spend my time doing.
Shyama Golden's work will be part of a group exhibition presented by Rajiv Menon Contemporary at Pink Palace, Jaipur, opening 9 August 2025.
Follow Shyama Golden here.
