Local spotlight: NFN Kalyan

NFN Kalyan: Studio 18's new resident artist

After winning a one-year artist residency at Studio 18 in Pembroke Pines, Miami artist NFN Kalyan moved into his rent-free studio in September. Already, he's sharing the space with "Nelson" (as in Mandela) and "Kim" (as in Kardashian).

"LeBron" by NFN Kalyan

The former South African president and the reality TV star are the most-recent subjects of Kalyan's carefully constructed, three-dimensional portraits. After completing a drawing in ink, he uses a computer-controlled laser to translate it onto about 25 layers of glass placed half an inch apart. Each one contains part of the subject's fave.

"I separate each layer by guesstimating what part of the face would be at each relative depth," Kalyan says.

The ghostly, eerily lit portraits resemble heads floating in tunnels. With sheets of glass supported by steel bars, each piece rests on a wood base and weighs about 200 pounds.

This isn't the only kind of work Kalyan does. "Mother" includes a sculpture of a lifelike, nude male baby made from silicone, paint and hair. The infant sits atop a gilded pedestal inside a dodecahedron, which has 12 pentagon-shaped sides. "Moksha," a word Kalyan translates as "freedom from birth," is written in Sanskrit on the baby's chest.

"Plato said that a dodecahedron was the shape of the universe," Kalyan says. "This is a portrait of me in the future, reincarnated." ... Continue reading Arterpillar's story on NFN Kalyan in the Sun-Sentinel.