Rajni Perera, “Dhum Lōkaya (Smoke World)”

by George Melrod

Rajiv Menon Contemporary, Los Angeles

Continuing through December 13, 2025

Rajni Perera, “Primitive,” 2025, acrylic gouacher, aluminum, glass and semiprecious stone beads, mother of pearl beads, and charcoal on polyester, 60 x 84”. All images courtesy of Rajiv Menon Contemporary, Los Angeles.

Born in Sri Lanka and based in Toronto, Rajni Perera draws from traditional and contemporary influences to create her own strikingly immersive personal mythology, inviting viewers into what the artist calls “a charged, mythic ecology.” Titled “Dhum Lōkaya (Smoke World),” Perera’s first solo show in the United States runs an ambitious gamut of mediums, while hairlike markings made directly on the wall weave among the disparate works in wispy strands to conjure the vaporous dominion of the title. But it is Perera’s lush, bodily lexicon that really unites and defines the show, imbuing it with an earthy elegance that offsets hints of feral abandon couched within its cryptic feminine narratives. Approaching the female form as a vessel for adaptation, growth and transformation, the work feels at once delicate and visceral, a dichotomy that the artist employs to often potent effect.

“Primitive” is the exhibition’s signature work, as well as its most disarming. It depicts a squatting naked woman specked with flies against a washy pink field. Her head is encased by (or transmuted into) a lavish bulblike flower, which extends behind her like a wake. The woman’s face is obscured by a knot of tiny elements sewn onto the flower’s base, including bits of wire and semiprecious stone beads. Its shiny black and green coloration suggests a tactile gathering of flies, an effect at once startling and frankly pretty unnerving. Turning its verdant floral iconography into something far more menacing, the work posits the female body as a site of fecund natural overgrowth but also decay, captive to an untamed nature.

Rajni Perera, “Dark Matter,” 2025, acrylic gouache, polymer clay, polyester thread, glass pearls on polyester, 84 x 120”.

The large horizontal painting titled “Dark Matter” depicts a woman with a basket on her back, leaning forward in a diving pose against a muddy maroon field, while her rump is transformed into the glaring face of a beast. All around her, a large python-like snake curves through the frame. Only on drawing up close to the painting does one notice that its many orange, diamond-shaped scales are separate elements that have been hand-sewn to the surface, along with numerous milky pearls punctuated by a single sculpted orange rose at the top of the figure’s head at the center of the painting.

Adding to these works’ tactile immediacy is the fact that they are painted on thin, translucent polyester, which allows us to see through them to the wall and supporting armature. The effect is subtle but transformative, puncturing the illusory nature of Perera’s scenes. Instead of seeing the paintings as representations on a two-dimensional plane, one also confronts them as hybrids, with textured real-world elements affixed to the surface of delicate membranes. The extra hint of bodily self-awareness they evoke only adds to the works’ corporeal frisson and enhances their destabilizing vision.

Rajni Perera, “Artifact 2,” 2025, charcoal on metallic marble mulberry stock, 30 x 20”.

Several works on paper lure us deeper into Perera’s elegant miasma, overlaying charcoal drawings of sensual abstract elements variously recalling vulvas, jewels or hairpins projected onto sinuous metallic marble stock. Conflating references to sexuality, decoration and spirituality, they exude totemic stature despite their indeterminacy. A set of three works on blue marbled paper offer studies of her “Swampgirly” sculpture: a segmented, serpentine entity that bobs across the concrete waterline of the gallery floor in scaly humps, finally emerging with the face of a female amphibian.

In “Durian” a standing female figure is merged with a spiky durian fruit; in “Be Prepared” a nude woman poses cheerfully with a teapot for a head, as if ready for service. Perhaps the most dramatic hybrid is a sculpture titled “Bittergourd,” made of glazed terra cotta and set outside the gallery. The image posits a hollow female figure striped and stippled like a vegetable, holding up two incense bowls, suggesting a more benign and docile type of fungal transmutation such as might frequent the dystopian HBO series “The Last of Us.”

Rajni Perera, “Swampgirly,” 2025, foam with steel armature, coated with a layer of polymer clay paint, an additional layer of wax, and beads, dimensions variable.

Melding images or narratives derived from stories from her childhood in Sri Lanka along with others culled from science fiction and her own personal mythology, Perera’s works may well include nuances or motifs that elude the grasp of Western observers, myself included. Yet for all their specificity, the works remain both relatable and compelling in their yearning to discover new models of identity that transcend or subvert proscribed roles and labels imposed on women in contemporary culture — whether Western, Eastern or that vast multicultural cross-current in between.

Rajni Perera, “Bittergourd,” 2025, terra cotta, under glaze, incense, 35 x 35 x 40”.

A kindred counterpoint might be the Baghdad-born Kurdish-Swedish painter Hayv Kahraman, whose elegantly stylized depictions of women often address issues of women’s roles, gender politics and migrant identity in a highly precise ritualistic language. But unlike Kahraman, Perera displays no deference to polite society. Instead she embraces a ‘running with the wolves’ sensibility that derives a sense of liberation from throwing off the shackles of social decorum and reverting to some primitive, even monstrous state — or perhaps, ironically, evolving into one.

And yet despite their liminal, at times abased condition, Perera’s characters always seem to embrace a biological imperative, to adapt, to survive, perhaps even thrive. Like her sinuous snaky mermaid, Perera’s vision is distinguished by its embrace of fluidity, freely blurring the lines between fact and fiction, past and future, civilization and wilderness, comfort and menace (and not least, between animals, vegetation and humanity). Alternately hopeful, rueful and bountiful, her works repeatedly straddle boundaries in unexpected ways. Whether or not you want to make that leap with her, you can’t help but appreciate their fierce, inventive spirit.

George Melrod has written hundreds of articles on contemporary art and culture for such publications as ARTnews, Art in America, World Art, American Ceramics, Details, and Vogue, among others. In the 1990s, he was the New York critic for Sculpture magazine, and wrote a regular contemporary art column for Art & Antiques, for whom he worked as a Contributing Editor. A native New Yorker, he moved to LA in 1998, and has since contributed to websites such as artcritical and artillery. From 2007-2017 he served as editor-in-chief of art ltd. magazine.