Rajni Perera & Marigold Santos
Efflorescence/The Way We Wake
November 21, 2024—April 6, 2025
Contemporary Calgary is pleased to present Rajni Perera and Marigold Santos: Efflorescence/The Way We Wake.
In 2020, the PHI Foundation presented a major group show called RELATIONS: Diaspora and Painting, which included the work of Rajni Perera and Marigold Santos. When Perera visited the exhibition and encountered Santos’s paintings for the first time, she felt an instant, deeply resonant connection. This moment of mutual recognition sparked the beginning of a relationship that would manifest itself in Perera’s invitation to Santos to collaborate on a duo presentation at The Armory Show in New York, in September of 2023. As one of the very best offerings at this thirty-year-old art fair, it was the spark that ignited the organization of this exhibition.
Born in 1985 in Sri Lanka, Rajni Perera was raised between Colombo, Sydney and then Scarborough and North York, Ontario. Her work explores hybridity, futurity, ancestorship, migrant and marginalized identities/cultures, monsters, and dream worlds. These areas of inquiry are embraced through a multi-disciplinary practice that includes painting, drawing, and sculpture, and incorporates materials such as clay, wood, textile, and most recently, synthetic taxidermy. Subverting oppressive discourses related to the idea of the “Other,” the beings and objects she creates are invested with power, dignity, and heroism.
Marigold Santos was born in the Philippines and immigrated to Canada in 1988. Her early childhood experience of immigration provides a starting point for her work that investigates the interrelated notions of “home” and the multiplicity of an identity in constant evolution, to ultimately explore the potentialities of transformation. Through an interdisciplinary practice that includes drawn, painted, and printed works, sculpture, tattooing, and sound, Santos creates a personal mythology. In her otherworldly environments that transcend time and place, hybrid creatures are capable of thriving in the precarious realm of the “in between.”
This duo exhibition showcases recent paintings and sculptures produced by each artist from 2021 to 2024 and begins with the collaborative piece after which the show is named. Efflorescence/The Way We Wake speaks to the artists’ diasporic experiences, research into their respective cultural heritages, art making, and motherhood. This large-scale sculpture consists of a masked humanoid, with a larger-than-life body whose legs are detached and splayed out in an impossible position, while the arms prop up the torso with the help of elongated breasts. On and around the body are small, flourishing outgrowths of fabricated plants and flowers. The mask, hands, and breast points are richly ornamented, and the eyes gaze out with purpose and fierce calm. Fashioned from a large variety of materials, including polymer clay and styrofoam, as well as metallic powder, synthetic hair, pearls, and floral foam, this work was produced over the course of a mere six, albeit marathon work sessions in Montréal during the summer of 2023. This major work welcomes us in, to contemplate and marvel at their distinct and shared cosmologies.
Presenting over thirty works, this exhibition is organized for us to appreciate each artist’s individual practices and to revel in their formal and conceptual affinities. What emanates throughout are vibrations of female power, that reverberate with instincts towards constant care, protection and the honouring of each of their personal stories and heritages. Through many entry points, Efflorescence/ The Way We Wake invites us into a pantheon of kindred spirits.
Curated by Cheryl Sim.
Produced and circulated by PHI Foundation for Contemporary Art
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About the Artists
Rajni Perera
Rajni Perera was born in Sri Lanka in 1985 and lives and works in Toronto. Perera seeks to open and reveal the dynamism of the icons, beings, and objects she creates by means of a subversive aesthetic that counteracts antiquated, oppressive discourse, and acts as a restorative force. Her art has been exhibited nationally and internationally at the McMichael Gallery, PHI Foundation (Montréal), the Museum of Contemporary Art (Toronto), The National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa), the Gwangju Biennale (South Korea), Colomboscope (Sri Lanka), and Eastside Projects (UK) among others. She is in numerous collections including the National Gallery of Canada, the Montreal Museum of Fine Art, the McMicheal Canadian Art Collection, and the Sobey Foundation. She was awarded the Sauer Art Prize at the Armory Show in 2023, was the recipient of the MOCA Toronto Award in 2022, and was the Ontario region finalist for the Sobey Art Award in 2021.
Marigold Santos
Marigold Santos was born in the Philippines, and immigrated with her family to Canada in 1988. She pursues an interdisciplinary art practice that examines notions of heritage, folklore, motherwork, and decolonization presented within the otherworldly. Her paintings, drawings, sculptures, and tattoo work explores self-hood and identity that embraces multiplicity, fragmentation, and empowerment, as informed by diasporic experiences. She holds a BFA from the University of Calgary, and an MFA from Concordia University. As a recipient of grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Alberta Foundation for the Arts, and the Conseil des Arts et des Lettres du Québec, she continues to exhibit widely across Canada.
About the Curator
Cheryl Sim, Managing Director and Curator, PHI Foundation for Contemporary Art
Cheryl Sim is the Managing Director and Curator at the PHI Foundation for Contemporary Art in Montreal. She began her career in 1992 at Studio D, the feminist studio of the National Film Board of Canada, which led her to discover video art and artist-run culture. Prior to joining the PHI Foundation in 2007, she was the Director of Activities and Communications at OBORO, one of Canada’s foremost artist-run centres, overseeing exhibitions, public events, residencies and publications. At the PHI Foundation, she has organized over twenty major exhibitions, most notably, STAN DOUGLAS: Revealing Narratives, YOKO ONO: GROWING FREEDOM and the group show RELATIONS: Diaspora & Painting which met with critical praise and touring engagements. Cheryl received a PhD in the études et pratiques des arts program at UQÀM (Université de Québec à Montréal) and her dissertation became the book Wearing the Cheongsam: Dress and Culture in a Chinese Diaspora published by Bloomsbury Academic UK in 2019. She has guest lectured at universities across Canada and has animated numerous panels and artist conversations in arts institutions, festivals and fairs including Papier Art Fair, MUTEK, Ars Electronica and Art Toronto. She has served on several peer review juries for the Canada Council for the Arts as well as the jury for the Sobey Art Award (2022) and the Claudine and Stephen Fellowship in Contemporary Art (2018). She is currently President of the Board of CAMDO (Canadian Art Museum Directors Organization) where she is also a member of the Diversity, Inclusion and Anti-Racism Committee. She also serves on the Boards of MOMENTA Biennale de l’image and the Association of Art Museum Curators.
