Elizabeth Englander

Gaga presents Eminem Buddhism Vol 2 by Elizabeth Englander.

To study the buddha way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be actualized by myriad things. When actualized by myriad things, your body and mind as well as the bodies and minds of others drop away. -Dōgen, “Genjōkōan”

I start my Yoginis by gathering scraps and piling them on small stools. Eventually, I lay them out on the floor, designating the key bodily nodes. Like embryonic stem cells, elements differentiate into the limbs, joints, and organs of the growing figure.

The scraps are pieces of wooden toys, furniture, and German-style, figurative nutcrackers made in China. At once hand- painted, ancestral totems and symbols of excess consumption, dolls and creepy old men, nutcrackers like these are ubiquitous in the U.S. I have dismembered my family’s collection and others sourced from craigslist.

Using wooden dowels to connect the fragments, I construct seated figures based on poses from Asian sacred art. The Yoginis in my 2022 show Eminem Buddhism were based on images of ferocious Hindu goddesses: icons of Chamunda, the yoginis, and Shaivite saint Karaikkal Ammaiyar. In the yogini temples of medieval India, dozens of icons with aged and youthful bodies represent the multifaceted nature of Shakti, the great goddess who personifies energy in all its forms.1 Inspired by the cumulative effect of this proliferation, I continued producing Yoginis.

— Gaga