In Chrysalis, life, where it lives, when it leaves, the spirit, and interactions with such entities that can only take place in the gut are made visual. Life, as death, is liquid, and Anjuli Rathod renders the transformative in layers of water based paint. The life cycle of spirit, of presence, emotion, wet on the canvas, creates a luminescent image of what is left behind as the colors’ ability to move dries up.
A chrysalis is a chamber of dead skin built for transformation. A body within which a worm becomes paper thin. When it exits its husk, it floats on air. The exhausted flesh hangs from silk on the branch. We consider the butterfly beautiful, yet we imagine this insect trapped in our guts when we are unsettled. Sometimes this unsettled feeling is called love, the nausea of emotional connectivity with a specter projected from the mind onto animated flesh. We see the memory of something that used to move in someone’s lifetime in the blank space left behind where only light lands. I love you, and I know this, because my guts are crawling with insects. I miss you, and I know this, because my guts are fluttering with a winged infestation. My body holds the evidence of a completed transformation that makes me sick when I think of you. I love you. I miss you. Please forgive me.
In his 1942 essay, Water and Dreams, Gaston Bachelard said, “A being dedicated to water is a being in flux. He dies every minute. The pain of water is infinite.” When are we let go? Water is life, and water is dying. When they cross the river, memory drips from our faces in streams of confusion, because we can not see the traveler. We imagine them. Everything we see is light, and everything we feel is presence. We relive the terror of loss in the moments of their visitation, even if we are dying to be with them again. It’s a trap inside of a labyrinth. Grief and terror are felt in the body. Peace lives in the soul. Human life is in divine contradiction. We ascribe the spiritual nausea to a winged creature at the end of its promise, to an angel, to love, to avoid calling it what we know in our guts it really is: an awareness of the unknown.
—Toniann Fernandez
A chrysalis is a chamber of dead skin built for transformation. A body within which a worm becomes paper thin. When it exits its husk, it floats on air. The exhausted flesh hangs from silk on the branch. We consider the butterfly beautiful, yet we imagine this insect trapped in our guts when we are unsettled. Sometimes this unsettled feeling is called love, the nausea of emotional connectivity with a specter projected from the mind onto animated flesh. We see the memory of something that used to move in someone’s lifetime in the blank space left behind where only light lands. I love you, and I know this, because my guts are crawling with insects. I miss you, and I know this, because my guts are fluttering with a winged infestation. My body holds the evidence of a completed transformation that makes me sick when I think of you. I love you. I miss you. Please forgive me.
In his 1942 essay, Water and Dreams, Gaston Bachelard said, “A being dedicated to water is a being in flux. He dies every minute. The pain of water is infinite.” When are we let go? Water is life, and water is dying. When they cross the river, memory drips from our faces in streams of confusion, because we can not see the traveler. We imagine them. Everything we see is light, and everything we feel is presence. We relive the terror of loss in the moments of their visitation, even if we are dying to be with them again. It’s a trap inside of a labyrinth. Grief and terror are felt in the body. Peace lives in the soul. Human life is in divine contradiction. We ascribe the spiritual nausea to a winged creature at the end of its promise, to an angel, to love, to avoid calling it what we know in our guts it really is: an awareness of the unknown.
—Toniann Fernandez
Chrysalis, watercolor, acrylic and flash on canvas, 52x60 inches, 2022
Underwater, watercolor, acrylic and flash on canvas, 54x60 inches, 2022
Asking Forgiveness, watercolor, acrylic and flash on canvas, 40x48 inches, 2022
Flame, watercolor, acrylic and flash on canvas, 20x16 inches, 2021
Above All Angels, watercolor, acrylic and flash on canvas, 26x32 inches, 2022
Untitled, acrylic and flash on canvas, 10x8 inches, 2020
Passage, watercolor, acrylic and flash on canvas, 40x48 inches, 2021
Shimmering, acrylic and flash on canvas, 30x26 inches, 2020
Cocoon, acrylic and flash on canvas, 48x54 inches, 2020
Somewhere, a dream, acrylic and flash on canvas, 46x38 inches, 2020
The Double, acrylic and flash on canvas, 14x11 inches, 2020
A Little Light, acrylic and flash on canvas, 14x11 inches, 2020
Crystalline, acrylic and flash on canvas, 18x16 inches, 2020
Sleep shapes, acrylic and flashe on canvas, 48x54 inches, 2019
Burial, acrylic and flashe on canvas, 48x54 inches, 2019
Refraction, acrylic and flashe on canvas, 58x48 inches, 2019
Red girls are spiders, acrylic and flashe on canvas, 58x48 inches, 2019
Book of Flowers, acrylic and flashe on canvas, 46x38 inches, 2019
Mirror, acrylic and flashe on canvas, 30x26 inches, 2019
Division, acrylic and flashe on canvas, 30x26 inches, 2019
Fissure, acrylic and flashe on canvas, 33x26 inches, 2019
The Far Off Blue Places
Anjuli Rathod + Vanessa Brown
Projet Pangée
Montreal, Canada
October 5 to November 11, 2017
