Maya Kogulan - Curatorial Rationale

My artwork explores cultural duality through the lens of the South Asian American experience. For most of my adolescence, I have struggled to define my own cultural identity as a Sri Lankan-American. Unable to fully identify with either my American or Sri Lankan culture, I often felt isolated and confused. While my experiences may be unique, the feelings of cultural confusion and conflict are shared by many first-generation immigrants. My exhibition synthesizes the experience of living between contrasting cultures into tangible art, accessible to the average viewer.

To capture many facets of the first-generation experience, I focused on a variety of emotions and greater themes. Within my photography, I put a larger emphasis on perspective. I used angles to frame subjects, putting them in positions of power and vulnerability. I utilize environments to set an emotional tone and refine my messaging. And, with post-photo editing, I focused heavily on color and light. Specifically, I used black and white photography to strip away unnecessary colors, which consequently helped amplify my emotions and intentions. The exhibition also allowed me to experiment with a range of new mediums such as mixed mediums, printmaking, sculpture, and digital art. These new mediums pushed me to incorporate elements of abstraction, texture, and depth into work.

In my exhibition, a common motif of conflict reoccurs in many of my pieces. Internally, cultural duality can lead to conflict within your self-image. While externally, it can be seen through elements of food, clothing, or media. In many of my pieces, I try to appeal to both external and internal cultural collisions. For example, in “Seeing Double”, I incorporated Indian biscuits and a Tamil newspaper to emphasize external cultural conflict. But, the photo itself, focuses more on self-image and internal conflict as demonstrated by the subject looking in the mirror.

Each work within my exhibition represents the stages of life, and subsequently, how one views and represents their cultural duality. When arranging each work in my exhibition, I choose to place them in chronological order - starting with childhood and ending with late adulthood. “In Between the Binary” and “Figuring it Out” represents the elementary years of life. As demonstrated through the abstraction of both pieces, the art is simple, emphasizing childhood innocence. However, both pieces, through symbolism, touch on the overall confusion first-generation children have regarding their identity.“Unconscious”, “Seeing Double”, and “She is America” represent early adulthood. In the teenage years, individuals are fully aware of both aspects of their identity but are frustrated by the cultural conflict. These pieces reflect cultural collisions through artistic contrast with color, borders, and light. The final stage is marked by “Sari Man” and “Ammama”. In these photographs, there is no clear division. Instead, both adults have aspects of their culture incorporated throughout their portraits. As they mature, individuals who experience cultural duality become more comfortable with their unique identity, like the subject in the environmental portraits.

The goal of my work is to not solely portray cultural duality. Instead, my vision is that my collective body of work demonstrates the journey of confronting and eventually, accepting an individual's cultural duality. I was able to demonstrate a variety of perspectives by focusing on various stages of life. My hope is the viewer is able to successfully grasp emotions relating to both the internal and external cultural conflict. And overall, I hope my work helps broaden the definition of the American experience.

Maya Kogulan

Figuring It Out (January 2021)

Foam, Felt, Paint, Mirrors

12 x 12 x 12 inches

The formative years of your identity take place in your young childhood. So, I choose to create a rubric cube -- a reference to a toy from my upbringing. The Rubik's cube itself represents the struggles of finding yourself. Similar to how you solve a Rubik's cube, my life experiences have helped me piece parts of my complicated cultural identity. From coming to two identities, you often question who you are and where do you belong within society”. To represent this struggle, I choose to put mirrors on the side of the cube with the words - “who I am”. I left the mirror side unsolved to represent how you are always coming into your identity and trying to put together the final pieces.