Phantasms of the Blue Sky is a body of work that builds a network of advocacy, tenderness, and cultural visibility for omitted narratives around layered migration stories. The work is an exploration of multidimensional narratives that illuminate the act of journeying—whether diasporic, introspective, or speculative—as a shared human experience. By drawing from my lived experience as a first-generation immigrant with roots in India and a syncretic, third-culture upbringing, the series navigates collective and personal memory, transmuting grief, longing, and alienation into a space for healing, restoration, and re-enchantment. Unity in this context is not a homogenization of identities but rather a recognition of the interwoven complexities, entanglements and interconnections that constitute belonging and displacement. The layered compositions invite viewers to contemplate connections between seemingly disparate stories—those shaped by migrations of the body, spirit, and in hyperreal speculative realms. These collaged tableaux and altars act as conduits for ancestral links and folk imaginaries, weaving together fragmented narratives into a lurid tapestry. The universalist threads resist the exclusionary logics of nativism and xenophobia, which seek to otherize and demonize those displaced by colonial conquest, economic instability, and ecological collapse. With an accompanying flash fiction piece centered around a first generation immigrant's plight and routines, the work counters the alienation imposed by hierarchical and extractive systems by creating portals to interconnected worlds where individual and collective struggles are honored as part of a shared continuum. In this sense, unity becomes an act of reclamation—an acknowledgment that the boundaries imposed by social stratification, borderization, and geopolitical divides are constructs that can be imaginatively and spiritually dismantled. The images, imbued with heightened artifice, build bridges between past, present, and speculative futures. Through a process of storytelling and ritual, Phantasms of the Blue Sky frames honors the multitudes within diasporic journeys, drawing on the regenerative power of ancestral memory and collective dreaming. By re-enchanting inner and outer landscapes, the work positions unity as a form of resistance—a luminous, multidimensional force that binds together histories, geographies, and futures, countering narratives of fragmentation with a vision of healing, unlearning and remembering that another world is possible. -- Excerpts from the corresponding fiction (written to supplement this body of work): "Sun Ra There Are Other Worlds (They Have Not Told You Of)” were the words emblazoned across her sweatshirt. In a Century Gothic typeface, the words were silkscreened with scarlet and magenta inks on top of a hypnotic cluster of sacred Egyptian symbols. The ankh, the eye of Ra (Udjat eye), the regal Horus falcon, the winged sun, the shen ring––all appeared in a jumbled procession on the surface of the fabric, receding and protruding through the inks." "Isha sat three rows behind the stranger, in the grips of a bleary eyed hypnagogic journey as the bus whizzed past busy intersections and thoroughfares of the city, although at this hour, they were only beginning to take their nascent shapes.....she managed to leave behind her bottle of naproxen and her headphones, vital auxiliaries that kept her satiated and alert on her long haul commutes. Today, there was to be no Geeta Dutt, no Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, no Mohammad Rafi. On most other days, the muffled audio from her wire headphones softly serenaded other weary passengers with qawalis and nostalgic erstwhile Bollywood hits. Only six more minutes had passed since she last checked the time as the bus braked suddenly, letting out a Banshee’s screech which accompanied a violent halt..."