Second-year graduate student Sai Varadan — a director, educator and visual artist — is currently presenting his MFA thesis in the Friedl Building’s Fredric Jameson Gallery. His presentation is one of many from this year’s graduating MFA students. The Chronicle sat down with Varadan to talk about his life, work, journey to Duke and thesis, which is titled “The Child Within.”
The Chronicle (TC): 20 years ago, your graduate thesis [from NYU Tisch] “God's Hand” debuted at the Tribeca Film Festival. What did that moment mean to you? And how did that direct your next steps?
Sai Varadan (SV): That was an amazing moment. You know, to be honest, it kind of sort of feels like [opening my exhibition] today. It's just a culmination of a couple years worth of work, and you're able to present it in such a great forum. I was 23 and you have a packed theater [in] downtown Tribeca, Manhattan — 300 people — giving you a standing ovation. As an artist, it's an amazing feeling.
I am a first generation American. Both my parents were immigrants, and most immigrant parents kind of share a similar philosophy — whether they come from Africa, Asia, South Asia, the Caribbean — to keep art as a hobby, study math and science. That’s just where [immigrant parents] come from, right? It's not an option. And so they didn't really know any better. And my parents, particularly my father, used to always say, “stop drawing, stop all this lousy drawing, stop writing all of this stuff.” That moment at Tribeca, when my thesis film, which I put my blood, sweat and tears into, gets accepted to a forum like that, it was an amazing feeling. My father is there screaming for me, “my son.” I feel like all successful artists have that moment where it goes from your bedroom, which is your makeshift studio, to a career.
TC: In your past, you have made the aforementioned short film and two feature length movies (“An American in Hollywood” and “The Health of Hope”). When going from the medium of film to your exhibition today, which is primarily painting, how do you incorporate the medium itself of your art? Do you change intention or approach, or do you try to keep as much consistent as possible between your different mediums that you've worked with?
SV: A common theme between visual arts and filmmaking, for me, is the element of storytelling. I started drawing and painting first. I didn't get into film until I got into NYU Tisch. I was always drawing comic books as a kid and making narrative stories in my artwork. So, transitioning to film was very simple. I'm like, wait, I can do everything that I was doing, but I don't have to draw, I don't have to paint. I can just light a scene and set up this camera.
[To start my film career], I moved to LA. I had some various levels of success there, but it wasn't my type of field. It wasn’t that LA isn't a beautiful place, but I’m a New York City guy. So I came back home and I was kind of at this mid-career crossroads. I went back to grad school, and I got into teaching.
There was this filmmaking summer program at a middle school in the South Bronx. It was a very rough school, and within the first week of the six week summer program, the kids were not listening to any of their teachers, and they were off the walls, but they were listening to me. The dean of the school approached me at the end of that first week and said, “You need to strongly consider a career as a teacher. You're so good at this. Why are you not a teacher?”
Then I started thinking. When I was a kid, I never had a teacher in high school that pulled me aside and said, “Hey, you're a smart kid. Come to my room after school. I'll help you.” You know, those words are just verbatim what I tell my students all the time. When that moment happened with the Dean, I was like, I'm gonna become an educator. It's imperative for me to give my students that type of mentor in their teenage years that I feel I never had.
TC: In the trailer for your short film, “An American in Hollywood,” there's this moment where one character jumps off the back of a van, and he's drawn over in this classic comic book style and given the title: “The Dissenter.” This moment, and much of your exhibit incorporates superheroes. Can you tell me about the relationship between your art, superheroes and your childhood?
SV: I grew up dreaming of being a Marvel comic book artist. And then when I was 19 years old, I interned at Marvel. I was getting paid to do a couple covers and things like that. And it was one of those moments where you get your dream job and you realize it's not what you expected. You were getting paid like $50 a page, and you had two week deadlines to pencil an entire issue, so the labor was just ridiculous.
[Despite this experience], that superhero element never really left me. In “An American in Hollywood,” there's a graphic novel style intertwined with a standard romantic comedy film. I play with the idea, as I do in this show, that artists are superheroes. And, I figuratively believe we've been put here to save the world from itself. Superheroes, in the story, put on a mask and fight crime. But, in real life, [artists] have to put on a shirt and tie. We have to go to work, just like all of them did. And then we come home — we have to take care of our children. We have to take it. But then, when everyone goes to sleep, we put on our mask, and we start painting all night, and we start editing our films all night, and we do it with no predetermined outcome.
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Kadin Purath is a Trinity junior and a culture editor for Recess.