LONDON.- PM/AM Gallery is presenting Too Bad, So Sad, Maybe Next Birth, a solo presentation by artist Shyama Golden. In addition to the paintings, the exhibition features a video installation created in collaboration with Paul Trillo, who is training an AI model to animate Shyama’s works. The title, a phrase spoken by Golden’s parents when things did not go according to plan, reflects the artist’s meditation on fate, agency, and the continuous cycles of life. This casual invocation of reincarnation reveals an irreverent perspective that challenges the very existence of life’s ‘meaning’, while rendering living and dying inherently spiritual.

Divided into four acts, the exhibition presents a sequence of imagined past lives, each represented through a pair of oil paintings: a large-scale scene and a close-up counterpart. These vignettes—spanning 19th-century Texas, 1930s Sri Lanka, 1970s Los Angeles, and present-day Mount Washington—trace the invisible forces of migration, labor, class, and cultural inheritance, revealing the cycles of history that continuously shape identity. Golden’s work merges the mythical and autobiographical, embedding references to Kolam—a traditional Sri Lankan form of folk theatre that blends dance, ritual, and masked performance to convey folklore and social commentary. She also draws from the island’s legendary Yakas, supernatural beings often portrayed as demons or protective spirits, whose masks feature heavily in Sri Lankan visual culture. These elements, intertwined with Golden’s own personal and ancestral narratives, manifest in lush, dreamlike paintings that collapse time, space, and identity into surreal, layered compositions.

At the heart of Too Bad, So Sad, Maybe Next Birth is the tension between destiny and self-determination, between individual agency and the larger systems that govern our lives. Golden’s world is rich with recurring symbols—spectral parrots, decaying fruit, and ghostly snakeskins—each an emblem of transition, loss, and renewal. These visual motifs portend the lives to come, suggesting that identity is an ever-evolving narrative shaped by the fictions we inherit and the lives we leave behind. Each of Golden’s paintings carry the sensation of staring into a long-forgotten dream—at once familiar and strange, unsettling and comforting. Amidst the chronicles of Maya’s lives––each a fresh toil––there is a sense of the peace found within endurance. There is a comfort born of infinity, a sense that each moment lived falls into and expands the algorithm, that experience nourishes possibility. Each painting triggers the thought, at once resigned and optimistic: maybe next life.

Shyama Golden (b. 1983, Texas) is a Sri Lankan American artist, who lives and works in Los Angeles, USA. With a background in painting and graphic design, her oil and acrylic paintings use figuration to explore the complex and layered ways identity is experienced, performed, and reinforced. Her work has been featured on covers for The New York Times, LA Times, and Netflix Queue, as well as various book covers such as Shruti Swamy’s Archer, Fatimah Asghar If They Come for Us, and Akweke Emezi’s PET and BITTER. Her work has been exhibited at Jeffrey Deitch Gallery (NYC and LA), Trotter & Sholer in NYC, Kunsthal n (Netherlands), Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Sri Lanka, and has been recently acquired by LACMA.