Shyama Golden, Daydream of a Nocturne, 2023, acrylic and oil on linen, 60 x 72 inches

Shyama Golden
In My Mind, Out My Mind

May 16 through June 22, 2024
Opens Thursday, May 16, 2024, 6–8pm

Harper’s Chelsea 534
534 West 22nd Street, New York, NY 10011
Tuesday–Saturday, 10am–6pm

Harper’s is pleased to announce In My Mind, Out My Mind, Los Angeles-based artist Shyama Golden’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. The presentation features new paintings by Golden and opens Thursday, May 16, 6–8pm, with a reception attended by the artist.

Across the paintings that comprise In My Mind, Out My Mind, Golden depicts universal cycles of rebirth as told through her personal biography and cultural memory. The artist derives inspiration from her neighboring Los Angeles landscapes and the figure of the yakka in Sri Lankan folklore, a demon or trickster spirit. Plummeting into the belly of the beast, Golden unravels her subconscious turmoil and is then reborn. In the biomythographical series, the artist transcends binaries of good and evil while meditating on the psychic, social, and ideological fissures that inform cyclical transformation.

Like a cinematic storyboard, each painting presents a different scene in Golden’s speculative odyssey. The narrative begins in the cemetery: eerie green hues resound, invoking the unsettling terrain where the living greet the dead. From there, Golden’s protagonist travels through gopher holes and subconscious highways where she collides with an imagined yakka and plunges into its wound. Golden’s avatar concludes her expedition at the Los Angeles River. Here, she emerges from a tree reborn, mirroring the river's regenerative journey. 

Repeatedly, Golden faces troubled interiority directly within this visual retelling of internal affliction. In works like Daydream of a Nocturne, which marks the beginning of the series, the artist’s fictional self sits beside a yakka alter ego among a ring of graves. On a padura, or traditional reed mat, Golden’s avatar presents an offering to the hybrid creature who bears a toothy grin: fish, served on a banana leaf, a clay oil lamp, and an all-American corn dog. These miscellaneous treats appease the yakka while gesturing towards diasporic hybridity. 

In Blood Orange Moon, Golden represents herself after she’s ejected from a tree trunk following her expedition through psychological space. As if Alice, emerging from the rabbit hole that leads to Wonderland, Golden’s protagonist shimmies out from the world of her inner demons and happens upon an optimistic landscape. This surreal work, like the rest that comprise In My Mind, Out My Mind, beckons a curiosity for the unfamiliar—a desire that dwells at the pith of the exhibition. Across these scenes, Golden invites the onlooker to be gentler with notions of what is flawed and foreign. It is these perplexing yet dynamic differences, within ourselves and among others, that make us human.

Shyama Golden (b. 1983, Bryan, TX) received a BFA from Texas Tech University in 2004. Most recently, Golden has exhibited her work at Harper’s, Los Angeles (2024); Rajiv Menon Contemporary, Los Angeles (2023); Swivel Gallery, Brooklyn (2023); Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Sri Lanka, Colombo, LK (2023); Friends Indeed Gallery, San Francisco (2023); and Jeffrey Deitch Gallery, Los Angeles and New York (2022). Her work has been featured in Artforum, New American Paintings, and Colossal. Golden presently lives and works in Los Angeles.

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Detail: Shyama Golden, Daydream of a Nocturne, 2023

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