The Messengers

Lance Gerber, courtesy Coachella

• Arquitectos

The three towering figures created by Kumkum Fernando appear at first as giant robots or action figures. But his “idols” — arranged in a rowto create a colorful gathering place — pack volumes of meaning into their larger-than-life forms.

The Sri Lankan artist, who lives and works in Vietnam, draws inspiration from the vivid colors of South Asian art and architecture, particularly Tibetan and Hindu temples, as well as from folk talesfilled with gods and demons that resonate from his youth.

photo_credit Lance Gerber, courtesy Coachella — Lance Gerber, courtesy Coachella

Fernando began his artistic practice by collecting objects, patterns, and items containing different iconography. It has since blossomed into a bold, ongoingreimagination of these found materials as contemporary art objects — impeccably composed“idols,” each paired with a poetic storytelling component written by the artist himself.

“Whenever I travel, I collect and document,” he says.“I have a library that I go through at different points in time. When I put them together, I often see unexpected things. I made a series of work completely out of window grills, another series from patterns from Persian rugs, and another from temple patterns. One day, I was arranging objects, and they appeared to form a figure. Then I thoughtI should make figures with these patterns.”

The figures he has created in the studio for almost a decade are roughly 30 to 40 inches tall. The tallest was 6 feet — until Coachella.

The three monolithic figures at the festival soar to between 65 and 80 feet — roughly seven stories high.Each figure stands on a plinth that has a base of steps that welcome visitors to gather and sit around the idols, which like the studio-scale version are each accompanied by a poem written by Fernando. At night, spotlights illuminate the figures.

“People refer to my artworks as robots because they have a very robotic form,” Fernando says. “To be fair, at first, most of them were meant to be robots from other dimensions, but now it’s more of a story to me. Each figure means something a bit more.I refer to them as ‘idols’ because they represent something that is important to me.”