Because of these visceral encounters with inhumanity, cruelty, and genocide, Weerasinghe still draws on these themes in his current work. Though he works in multiple media including painting and drawing, there is a consistency with his use of gestural and expressionist marks in order to express this type of physical violence at the hands of others. Through his body of work, he hopes to create an aesthetic framework that sparks conversation and change against past, present, and future violence. In this way, he is not just an artist, but a social activist. His work is the vehicle through which he fights power imbalance and destructive discourse, in search of peace.
Here in the Van Every/Smith Gallery, Weerasinghe is specifically reflecting on the theme of geopolitical borders and cultural identity, along with his two fellow artist residents, Yong Soon Min and Tintin Wulia. However, the core themes listed above never leave his work. On his current residency, Weerasinghe notes his personal understanding of borders, and how it relates to individual identity:
“The work or the series of works that I try to do here during my residency is about how borders, taken the concept in its widest sense, make the idea of the self to disintegrate, to fragment and to frustrate. But as we know the ‘self’ doesn’t really disintegrate or fragments as such. Said in other words, what I try to capture is the tyranny of the frustrating processes that borders engender.”
