Paintings of American Aspiration Under Pressure

Waruna Perera is a Sri Lankan-born American painter whose work examines how power maintains itself through spectacle, pageantry, and civic mythology. Having grown up across three countries — Sri Lanka, Australia, and the United States — Perera came to America having already learned that national identity is as much costume as conviction. That dual position, fluent in American iconography yet skeptical of its promises, is the engine of the work. His large-scale paintings recast flags, crowns, and processions through distorted, cartoon-adjacent figures rendered with formal care and deliberate ambiguity.