Rajni Perera & Marigold Santos exhibition at Contemporary Calgary: Dazzling, striking and nuanced
By Abbas Hussain, March 23 2025—
Contemporary Calgary is currently showcasing the Rajni Perera & Marigold Santos exhibition Efflorescence/The Way We Wake from Nov. 21-Apr. 6.
Rajni Perera was born and raised in Columbo, Sri Lanka before moving to the province of Ontario. Her work explores the idea of marginalised cultures, dream worlds and more. She explores these themes through various mediums including but not limited to paintings, drawings and sculpture.
Marigold Santos was born in the Philippines before immigrating to Canada in 1988. Her background as a young immigrant serves as the muse for her artwork, capturing the delicate nature of the fusion of different cultures as well as the notion of many homes. She uses painted works, tattooing, sound and even poetry to capture these ideas.
The exhibition featuring the artwork of both Perera and Santos. They perfectly complement each other, with Santos’ work standing out for her artistic patterns that transform the body into something else, a reflection of the environment, while Perera’s work captures the subtlety of the body, and uses her palette to bring out the humanity in the body
The striking choice of patterned colours in Santos’ artwork captures a sense of abstraction that mystifies the human body, turning it into a reflection of the world. Two of the pieces really show the naturalness and honesty of the body, represented by the dark green patterns, while two others signify a violent nature, using shades of deep and violent purples.
One of my favourite pieces of Santos is shroud (bitter and sweet seeds of growth), which captures a sense of longing for something that is no longer there. The lack of the features of the face along with the choice of fruits and vegetables from the Philippines capture the stolen nature of the soul and a longing to be re-united.
On the other hand, Perera with her simplistic colour draped with a tea-laced backdrop shows her exceptional vulnerability.
One of my favourite pieces of hers is the sculpture called Knife, which depicts a peach-shaded statue of a woman, covered in a hat with a bullet coming out of her mouth. The motif of the bullet symbolises the piercing nature of the truth that women have to say, yet on the other hand, the tentacle-like flakes around the bullet show how the meaning is often lost, due to society’s inability to accept the sometimes bitter truth of reality. The sculpture’s neck marks the literal silencing of a woman’s voice, slowly bleeding away.
Another one of my favourite pieces is called I Couldn’t Wait Longer which is a piece depicting three women whose faces resemble different animals. This piece almost evokes this sense of destigmatization of the female body as well as the hand of the three figures reaching out into the sky, in search of recognition and power.
The piece that brings the exhibition together is Efflorescence/The Way We Wake. It depicts the body of a woman with dismembered legs. The mask on the face with spikes on it shows the trials and tribulations of motherhood and birth, while the dismembered legs show how breaking and perhaps traumatising this process is. This piece brings together both of the artists’ works in a way that is both terrifying and beautifully abstract, representing the infinite complexity of the process of life.
More about Santos’ and Perera’s exhibition can be found on the Contemporary Calgary website.