Sahana Ramakrishnan: An Ocean of Time

Apr 26, 2024

A towering jackal leers across the wave of a flood. Crows fly around its head, carrying emerald droplets of water with human babies inside. Above them, a glittering eye bursts beneath a black sun. This is Jackal Brings a New Era (2023), a recent painting wrought in old symbols. Like many works in An Ocean of Time, Sahana Ramakrishnan’s first New York solo exhibition, its imagery can be read through syncretic mythological traditions. The sol niger and the third eye of Shiva are two symbols of destruction giving way to creation, the former found in western alchemy and the other in Hindu mythology. The crow and the jackal, meanwhile, are carrion-eaters that feature in multiple mythologies as tricksters and culture-bringers. Both are consorts of the goddess Kali in her crone form, the graveyard-keeper and vanquisher of demons. The imagery in this painting converges upon a message that might be understood across divides of culture and time: from death comes new life; apocalypse precipitates new worlds.

Ramakrishnan’s body of work encompasses an oceanic scope, evoking the vastness of creation and the scope of deep time. Fourteen paintings, all created this year and ranging in size from manuscript-like tablets to wall-size tableaus, are animated by an interspecies theater of serpents, anemones, lions, tigers, trees of life, and more speculative bodies, all built up in transparent layers of jewel-toned oil paint. Many of these figures have rich mythological lineages, but traditional iconography is not a sufficient cipher for Ramakrishnan’s work. In one luminous self-portrait the artist reminds us of the present, showing herself in Carhartt overalls and a loose hoodie—a distinctly contemporary artist’s uniform that contrasts pointedly with the exhibition’s timeless imagery. She gazes out of the frame as she draws, appearing to transcribe an external reality into the canvas.

In her artist talk at Fridman Gallery in September, Ramakrishnan emphasized a lived experience in the twenty-first century, tracing her thematic inspiration for this body of work to transformative encounters with the more-than-human world. She cited a childhood opportunity to snorkel the Great Barrier Reef as a source of inspiration to which “nothing has come close,” and a memory which is now infected by loss. “It makes me unbelievably sad to think about what’s happening to it, how much is lost for other generations,” she said. In the artist’s lifetime, more than half the Great Barrier Reef has been damaged by bleaching associated with rising ocean temperatures. Compared to the embodied encounter of diving, knowledge of the unfolding catastrophe in our world’s largest coral reef is an abstraction; for this writer as well as for Ramakrishnan, who grew up in Singapore and is now based in New Jersey, it comes not through direct experience, but scientific reports from the other side of the planet.

We all live with the weirdness of globalized information overload, and particularly awareness of ecological disorder on a planetary scale. How can we assimilate the oceanic excess of all that we experience, read, inherit, remember, and intuit? How does a meaningful reality cohere when meaning itself seems easily abstracted, forgotten, or destroyed? Ramakrishnan’s work deals with nothing less than the search for a cosmology to answer these questions. Throughout her paintings, fragmented human bodies attempt to incorporate the rich worlds within: floating eyes are witnessing; ears are listening; arms are wrapping around the pictures’ edges; mouths are yawning to swallow. The explosive canvas Cry Baby in the Deep directly mythologizes the weight of an overwhelming reality, showing a woman sobbing at the bottom of an indigo ocean. She is accompanied by tiny nāga, serpent demi-gods known in ancient times to guard the underworld’s secrets. We can’t hear what the nāga whisper in her ears, but we see orange tears falling from her anguished face, forming a roiling pool beneath her.

Cry Baby in the Deep grows more powerful in dialogue with a contemporary pursuit of meaning, one that often relies heavily on scientific knowledge. The painting appears fantastical, but salty lakes at the bottom of the ocean are no myth to modern science. They’re known as brine pools, volumes of water at least three times saltier than the ambient ocean that form hyper-dense bodies on the seafloor, often poisoned with geothermal methane and sulfur dioxide. Lifeforms like us cannot survive these toxic waters, but ecosystems thrive at the edges of these oceans beneath the sea, built on a foundation of chemosynthetic microbes that metabolize methane and sulfur to miraculously create energy without sunlight. Evolutionary biologists now theorize that chemosynthetic organisms were the original forms of life on Earth. Despite being known to science for only half a century, these deep-sea ecosystems converge with age-old myths of the underworld’s generative secrets, and with countless origin stories that trace all beginnings to the sea. Both science and mythology demand some belief in things we’ll never witness, but in their converging insights we may find stories to reckon with visible disasters, hinting that unseen processes of world-making persist in the deep.

Surface and depth are the formal primes of Ramakrishnan’s paintings, which circulate attention and significance through their glazed strata to suggest a layered and mysterious reality. Many of the works’ disembodied eyes—a pervasive motif—are not painted, but beaded onto the canvases in sparkling seed beads, while gold-leaf details and edges throughout the works recall religious icon painting. These decorative elements dwell on the surface of the works in a way that emphasizes their layered quality, reminding us to look deeper. Nor can we stop at historical exegesis of the work’s mythological personas, which Ramakrishnan characterized as merely different “skins” for shape-shifting ideas. The water buffalo, for instance, has been subject to many projections of human symbolism and stories across millennia, none of which enclose its enigmatic apparition within a curtain of light in The Earth at Night (solar storm). Traditional meanings are still just the surface—or perhaps the middle depth, which in oceanography is called the mesopelagic layer. In this twilight zone of the sea, increasing depth gradually plunges the world into darkness, the way that old stories gradually sink beneath cultural memory.

Not all meaning is easily legible, and beneath all the layers of color and imagery in Ramakrishnan’s paintings are tiny handwritten texts that turn each canvas into a tantalizing manuscript. Much of the writing is unreadable or difficult to discern, but phrases that do reach the light of the surface inflect the paintings’ underlying significance. “Please tell all the animals that I am sorry,” is written over and over again, forming rolling cursive waves, in The Messenger, a painting that depicts a chimera—with heads of a human, a buffalo, a leopard seal, and a salmon—who gallops on all fours through a golden wave, carrying a message against its belly in the form of two sea snakes.

In mythological tradition, serpents are bearers of secret knowledge, and often medicine. Another sea snake emerges from a pink conch shell, its body curling into a perfect spiral, in Ramakrishnan’s monumental Song of the Naga. Spirals appear in nearly every painting in An Ocean of Time, for the same reason that our very galaxy takes this shape—it’s the ultimate symbol of assimilating chaos and order, capable of holistically encompassing the world. Sound resonates in the whorls of a conch shell, which is why they say you can hear the ocean inside it. The same shape forms the cochlea of the inner ear in mammals, allowing us to hear many different frequencies. From the depths of the ocean to your inner ear, Ramakrishnan’s serpent emerges to whisper the message that can make you whole: we are an unbroken story, a never-ending song.

The purpose of mythology is to carry complex ecological and cultural knowledge, transcribing the secret mechanics of connection between life forms that are impossible to articulate in plain language. Myths have always been “skins” with which to cloak those precious ideas, both as disguises that protect them and costumes that make them more recognizable. In the modern world, scientific and mythological ways of knowing have long been considered oppositional, to the extent that the word “myth” is most often used to ascribe falsehood. But when the knowledge generated in our scientific paradigm makes us yearn to repair our culture with a more-than-human world, these embodied forms of knowledge shall return. Some ocean currents take many centuries to complete their cycles, slowly restoring minerals from the abyss. Like the messenger who races into the new era, emerging from the waves with urgent wisdom from the deep past, each character in Ramakrishnan’s paintings symbolizes the quest for reintegration.

Alex A. Jones is a writer currently based in Brooklyn. Her project “Art and Ecology in the Third Millennium” is supported by the The Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant.