New Jersey-based graphic designer Shekar Menon collaborates with alt-R&B musician Saachi Rajadhyaksha and producer Ayan De on a mixed-media audiovisual piece that uses letterpress, screen printing, frame-by-frame animation and archival footage to give the COVID-19 pandemic a voice.
Doom’s My Religion is the pandemic personified, not from the perspective of those who lived through it, but from the point of view of the destructive force itself. “There’s nowhere to run to, nowhere to hide from something you don’t see coming,” says Saachi Rajadhyaksha, the alt-R&B and soul musician whose track anchors the piece.
“The song was written in 2021, right after the third wave of the virus. When Ayan played me the piano idea and beat, it immediately clicked and visually played out in my head. It was almost as if I was the sadistic spokesperson of this destructive force. A force that wanted to doom everything as if that’s all it knew.”
Shekar Menon, working on the project during his MFA in Graphic Design at MICA, built the visual material across the school’s screenprinting and letterpress studios. Woodblock impressions, iterated letterforms, repeated print experiments, textures and marks built up into a library that could be sequenced in response to the structure and pacing of Saachi’s track. The printed elements were then brought into dialogue with frame-by-frame animation, archival footage and motion graphics during editing, working directly between the physical print studio and digital tools. The visual language is maximalist throughout: layered, dense and restrained only by the dark and introspective logic of the music it accompanies.
The themes the piece explores, decay, destruction, loss, capitalism and survival, are given form not through documentation of human suffering but through the personification of what caused it. The pandemic as character, as voice, as a force that does not distinguish between its targets. That framing gives the collaboration a conceptual clarity that grounds the visual excess: the maximalism is the nature of the thing being depicted.
The project was completed in 2023 and later showcased at Method in Mumbai, presenting the work as a finished audiovisual piece rather than a collection of graphic experiments. It was mentored by Jennifer Cole Phillips, Shekar’s graduate faculty at MICA.
Shekar Menon is a graphic designer from Mumbai based in New Jersey, holding an MFA from MICA and working as an Associate Graphic Designer at The Working Assembly in New York. His practice spans branding, editorial, packaging, illustration, visual identity and motion, with recognition from Communication Arts, The Design Kids, Kyoorius and the Society of Typographic Arts.
Website: shekarmenon.com Instagram: @mosunkai / Saachi: @heyitssaach
Doom’s My Religion, 2023. Mixed-media audiovisual piece. Video and illustration: Shekar Menon. Music and lyrics: Saachi Rajadhyaksha. Production: Ayan De. Mix: Hendrick Valera and Ayan De. Master: Ayan De. Showcased at Method, Mumbai.
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