Pushpakanthan Pakkiyarajah
Straddling Ocean and Sky

March 11, 2023 – April 8, 2023

Brief Histories presents Straddling Ocean and Sky, a solo exhibition by interdisciplinary artist Pushpakanthan Pakkiyarajah. Opening on March 11 and on view through April 8, 2023, this marks the artist's first exhibition in New York City. Including video, mixed media and works on paper, the exhibition centers on Pakkiyarajah’s iterative system of collating and creating images that weave cycles and ecologies of nature, legacies of colonial histories, and the fallout of globalization.

Pakkiyarajah’s methods are intuitive and reflective, blending a combination of found images with socio-historical narratives and folkloric music and vocalization. Straddling Ocean and Sky (2021-2022), a stop motion animation video, is a layered digital montage of reverberating images and sound. Collaborating together with Sri Lankan folk and classical musicians, Pakkiyarajah enables a distinctive audiovisual harmony that moves through rhythm and patterns of iconography, mythology, and the transformations of the natural world: plumeria flowers cross channels of water as they pass ships exploring the sea, nature overrun by war machines, and mycelium spreads its tentacles across the screen.

Through works on paper and mixed media sculptures, Pakkiyarajah further explores material changes of a natural world amid human impact. In Mycelium and the Charred Landscape III (2021), masses of black woven matter evoke processes of decomposition and fermentation similar to the regenerative power of mycorrhizal networks that keep forests alive. Do Disappeared Trees Exist? (2020) is a series of twelve ink on paper drawings that depict palmyra tree trunks, a recurring protagonist in the artist’s works, in a sequence of states of breakdown and accumulation. The tree is caught in a loop, its uprooted trunk floats, splits, and splinters, exposing its red interior in a galaxy of surrounding gray matter.

Pushpakanthan Pakkiyarajah is an interdisciplinary artist working through the material residues of colonial legacies and its effects on Sri Lanka’s civil war (1983-2009) and their continued consequences on communities and the natural environment. Pakkiyarajah is featured in Thinking Historically in the Present, Sharjah Biennial 15 (2023), and has participated in group exhibitions including Of Love and War, Linden Museum, Stuttgart (2022); Ouroboros, Gallery 400, Chicago (2022); Love Thy Neighbour, Asia Triennial Manchester, Manchester Metropolitan University (2021). Solo shows include, The Red Carpet, Institut für Alles Mögliche, Berlin (2022); Wounded Landscapes, Saskia Fernando Gallery, Colombo, Sri Lanka (2019); and The Disappearance of Disappearances, History of Art Gallery, Cornell University, Ithaca (2018); Shadow Scenes, Colomboscope (2015), Colombo. He lives and works between Chicago and Batticaloa, Sri Lanka.

Pushpakanthan Pakkiyarajah, Straddling Ocean and Sky, 2021-2022. HD Video. Installation view: Brief Histories, New York, 2023.