Rainbow Body
2018 - Film & Video (Film & Video)
2:07 minutes
Chitra Ganesh
The title of Rainbow Body by Chitra Ganesh refers to an elevated state of, or metaphor for, the consciousness transformation known as a rainbow body. The Buddhist master Padmasambhava achieved this state from his union with Mandarava, a female spirit (dakini) and princess in Tantric Buddhism. Through study and physical connection, each played a key role in the other’s enlightenment. Ganesh’s work takes inspiration from the cave on the right in the painting of the bodhisattva Maitreya, located adjacent to the animation. The cave structure is elaborated upon the extensively built out, introducing an interior depth where the ultimate transformation happens. The animation opens with Mandarava waking up to a dream in her bedroom and follows her journey through the Bardo, the sometimes terrifying passageway between death and rebirth. The aerial and gliding camera movements reconfigure imagery of the Bardo from paintings with a greater sense of space and depth. The work also combines the artist’s line drawings, watercolors, and paintings with pictorial elements from a variety of original sources.
Spanning printmaking, sculpture, and video, Chitra Ganesh’s work draws from broad-ranging material and historic reference points, including surrealism, expressionism, Hindu, Greek and Buddhist iconographies, South Asian pictorial traditions, 19th-century European portraiture and fairy tales, comic books, song lyrics, science fiction, Bollywood posters, news and media images. The process of automatic writing is central to the practice of the Indian-American artist and emerges from dissecting myths to retrieve critical moments of abjection, desire, and loss. By layering disparate materials and visual languages, Ganesh considers alternate narratives of sexuality and power.
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