Aruni Dharmakirthi

"The difference between things and events is that things persist in time; events have a limited duration. A stone is a prototypical “thing”: we can ask ourselves where it will be tomorrow. Conversely, a kiss is an “event.” It makes no sense to ask where the kiss will be tomorrow. The world is made up of networks of kisses, not of stones."

—Carlo Rovelli, The Order of Time, 2017

...myth unfolds alongside everyday life.

Coming of age’ is typically framed as the formation of identity, and is associated with the passage from teenagehood to adulthood. However, I don’t see it as a single passage. I think it is a process that repeats throughout our life.

The Buddhist concept of the mind-stream offers one way of thinking about this: consciousness as a phenomenon without beginning, moving through successive reincarnations the way a river moves through changing landscapes. The same current, endlessly reshaped by what it passes through.

Within this body of work, I use the idea of the ‘Mind Stream’ to think about identity, memory, and coming of age as fluid rather than fixed. Not a threshold you cross once, but a shape you keep taking again.

Information arrives and blends into multiple narratives. Sometimes I awakened from a dream having touched some realization I could not reach in my daily life.

In Gnostic cosmology the goddess Sophia accidentally creates the world while exploring. Creation stories from the ‘west’ seem to often begin with an accident/mistake. Sophia falls out of the perfect universe she was a part of and in that fall her body fractures into millions of pieces which become the world and its inhabitants. So everything is Sophia!

There is no evidence The Thunder, Perfect Mind* is written from the perspective of Sophia but the deity speaking in the poem seems to be a curious and contradictory goddess who is simultaneously everything!

—Aruni Dharmakirthi

Aruni Dharmakirthi is a Sri Lankan-American artist and educator based in New York City. Her interdisciplinary practice explores memory and ritual through textiles, painting, sculpture, and collaborative projects. Grounded in both research and intuition, Dharmakirthi’s work often engages themes of diasporic identity, care, and the layered experiences of memory and migration.

She received an MFA in Visual Studies from the Pacific Northwest College of Art and a BA in Studio Art and Art History from Florida State University.

Dharmakirthi has exhibited nationally and internationally, with recent shows including Swimming in the Mirror at Canopy Studio (NY), Aja’ib at Tempest (NY), Semi-Autobiographical at the Ceylon Literary and Arts Festival (Sri Lanka), and Inordinate Skies at Khoj (New Delhi). Other venues include BRIC, Transmitter, Nationale, Amos Eno Gallery, Saskia Fernando Gallery, and PDX Contemporary Art.

Her work has been supported by The Charlene Victor & Ella J. Weiss Cultural Entrepreneur Fund (2025), The Canopy Program (2024–25), the A4A Production Fund (2021), the American Craft Council Equity Award (2019), and residencies at BRIC (NY) and Centrum (WA).

Caitlin Reid is a Brooklyn-based painter whose practice bridges collage, representational oil painting, and deep archival research. As Program Director of Tempest Gallery, where she has interviewed over thirty contemporary artists, and co-founder of the artist collective Immaterial Projects (2023–25), her studio work is deeply informed by curatorial thinking and cross-disciplinary dialogue. Reid is currently developing love is a force of nature, a major body of paintings synthesizing fifteen years of personal diaries, classical Greek mythology, and spiritual experience.

At Tempest, we want to talk about art in a maelstrom. We invite artists to broach difficult conversations, seek anti-imperialist frameworks and honor craft and cultural heritage in their practice in textiles, sculpture and installation. Launched in 2024, Tempest Gallery is based in the culturally rich neighborhood of Ridgewood, New York. Through our programming, we aim to create community and a space for gathering and presenting work.