The Scorpion Gesture, 2018, set of 5 digital animations

Rainbow Body 2:05 minutes, Silhouette in the Graveyard 1:22 minutes, Metropolis 1:23 minutes, Messenger 1:01 minutes, Adventures of the White Beryl, 2:10 minutes. Animated by THESTUDIONYC.

For The Scorpion Gesture, Chitra Ganesh created a series of animated artistic interventions in the Rubin’s collection galleries. All five are inspired by nearby artworks that relate to Padmasabhava, known to Tibetans as the Second Buddha, and Maitreya, the Future Buddha, though each departs from the aesthetics and iconography associated with the traditional works. Ganesh’s animations reveal her inimitable and brilliant skill of translating complex narratives—often of mythological or epic proportion—into poetic, contemporary, and lucid visual stories.

While this approach is also evident in her paintings and drawings, it is further amplified in her animations. Adopting and adapting elements from historical objects for this time-based medium, Ganesh takes disparate elements that might all meet the eye at the same time on the surface of a thangka painting and gives them additional narrative and spatial depth. She offers viewers a new lens through which to consider objects in the Rubin’s collection, while her own works invite repeated cycles of watching to catch the rigorous extent of their depth, detail, and care. Collaging her line drawings, watercolors, and paintings with elements from historical reference works, these animations live and linger between two and three dimensions, challenging conventional limitations of drawing and sculpture. They are markers of transformation that speak simultaneously to the historical past, the sociopolitical realities of our present, and the speculative potential of apocalyptic and far futures.

—Beth Citron, Curator

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