This exhibition is presented by the artist Shadin Risha. Shadin was born in a small country name Bangladesh but he was mostly raised in New York. Risha moved to New York at the age of twelve and he never looked back. He’s currently a student of New York City College of technology. parsuing his degree in arts and advertisement Design. Risha’s project ‘Thenderous Lifowao’ was inspire by Tom Phillips’ project which was known as “The Humument”. Risha came up with his project title Thenderous Lifowao by blocking out words from the main title of the book ‘The brief wondrous life of oscar wao’ by writen by Junot Diaz. Risha’s main goal was to change the theme of the book which originally was a story of a boy who’s constantly failing failures and disappoint and transform the character into a brave and mentally strong boy who takes all the negativity that’s thrown at him and turns it into the fuel to get what he wants.
The book’s original name was ‘the brief wondrous life of Oscar wao’. Instead of name the project with a title that’s easier to understand and could be found in the dictionary, Risha decided to come up with a completely new and different title. But since his project and the original book has a connection where both projects portrays the same characters but in a way, Risha chose to recreate the book’s new name from the original name. He keeps the word ‘The’ and adds ‘ndrous’ from ‘Wondrous’ to create a new word ‘Thendrous’. For the word ‘Lifowao’ he takes ‘Lif’ from the word ‘life’, the letter ‘O’ from ‘Of’ and adds them with the last word ‘Wao’.
The main book ‘The brief wondrous life of Oscar wao’ is a story about a boy who talks about his life and how the best part of life for him was when he was a eleven years old. Risha takes his sorrowful life story and decided to turn the half pathetic looser character into someone who’s bravely fighting for things he believes in and to survive during an apocalypse.
The project portrays a character from a Hispanic family who’s recently discovered himself and found out that he is attracted toward both women and men. But coming from a Hispanic family things turns out to be very hard for him. To make everything far worse a dangerous virus breaks out and the sick people starts to transform into a different types of creatures and starts to crave for human blood.
Risha goes on to tell his story by creating juxtaposition, perspective, positive and negative spaces and using values. There are pages where he fills up the whole page with black ink and leaves a little part of the book un-inked to create positive and negative space so when the audience glimpse at the page their eyes are naturally being drawn to the in-inked part which leads them into reading the left out portion of the story and conquer another piece if the puzzle that creates the whole story.
One of the page on the book creates two types image based on the angle the audience are looking at. First Risha colors over book page with black ink while leaving out some phrases and words that makes up a story. But then if the audience takes the time to look at the book horizontally they will see a silhouette of a boy sticking his head out of a door of a dark room with the sign of both bravery and fear that’s portrayed by his body language.
Risha decided to work on this particular book because he felt like it was something needed to be done. The story of Oscar Wao is not just a story a boy. There are people all around us that are living proof of that story. Risha wanted to create a fighter out of the character to influence and inspire the people that are beaten up to become a fighter themselves.
