Straight Outta Bushwick and Smack into Ohio
CINCINNATI, Ohio —She fades into her own artwork, Dasha Shishkin, standing at the end of a narrow gallery on the second floor of the Contemporary Arts Center (CAC), architect Zaha Hadid's vertical museum of odd nooks and crannies in Cincinnati, Ohio.
CINCINNATI, Ohio — She fades into her own artwork, Dasha Shishkin, standing at the end of a narrow gallery on the second floor of the Contemporary Arts Center (CAC), architect Zaha Hadid’s vertical museum of odd nooks and crannies in Cincinnati, Ohio.
Part of it is due to the fact that the thirty-four-year-old Shishkin is doll-like petite. She’s a tiny figure in gray pleated dress shorts and matching sweater whose bobbed brunette hair barely touches the first rung of the motorized lift sitting in the middle of the gallery. Most of her disappearing act has to do with the lush colors and playfully perverse figures of her artwork; canvases of varying sizes and diverse materials (Mylar, paper, cloth) currently spread all around her as she prepares for her first solo museum show.
Shishkin, a Russian-born New Yorker, earns rave reviews and comparisons to Henry Darger and Ergon Schiele for her work in group shows like MoMA PS1’s Greater New York 2005 as well as her 2009 solo exhibition Dasha Shishkin: Desaparecido at Zach Feuer Gallery in Manhattan.
Still, Shishkin remains somewhat under-the-radar to the general public, perhaps until now, thanks to her first solo museum show, I Surrender Dear, that includes a salon-inspired, on-site installation of some fifty-plus drawings with some of her works applied directly to gallery walls.
It’s two days to go before the opening of I Surrender, Dear and Shishkin takes a break from the installation to discuss how she came up with the title — words, semantics, the language behind her art are important to her — as well as her autonomy in creating the show itself.
Shishkin has come a long way from her Williamsburg apartment and Bushwick studio for I Surrender Dear and one of the two museum installers helping Shishkin points to the spread-out work and jokes: “It’s as if New York arts plane just crashed in flyover.”
I Surrender, Dear includes previous work from gallery shows; loans from collectors of Shishkin’s drawings, and new works being seen publicly for the first time.
Some of her works, the more Darger-like lithographs on loan from past buyers, lean against the white gallery walls. Her most recent works, the playful perverse drawings on Mylar sheets, are spread across the floor and around the ladders and hydraulic lift in use to hang the works.
The work has a spontaneous feel thanks to the surface splatters of color and Shishkin’s quick method of drawing.
“I do refer to all my work as drawings instead of paintings but if someone else refers to it as painting I do not correct them,” Shishkin says matter-of-factly.
“But the works are like a city block,” Shishkin adds. “They tell multiple stories.”
Art has always been a major part of her life with parents who worked in the theater, especially her late father who was a puppeteer. Stops in her arts education include the New School for Social Research and advanced study at Columbia University but despite making her home in one of the world’s most cosmopolitan cities, Shishkin continues to embrace old world traditions and superstitions.
“You know it steals the soul,” Shishkin says smiling but in all seriousness, declining to have her photo taken. “The Native Americans know this.”
A week later, a return visit to the CAC reveals the completed installation and I Surrender, Dear is dazzling to the eye and immersive to the soul.
The second-floor gallery is a long and narrow space with high ceilings, what CAC museum director Raphaela Platow refers to as a church-like space with a colorful altar at the end of the room. Sitting in her upper-floor office, Platow agrees that there are only so many exhibition slots in a given year at any museum and so each show becomes an important opportunity to showcase significant work.
“I do not have a crystal ball and I would not presume to predict where Dasha will be in the future,” Platow adds. “But she is doing very colorful, interesting vibrant work and I’m thrilled for the opportunity to put it on display.”
Shishkin’s drawings hang high on the walls at the eastern end of the CAC gallery. Different materials are on display, canvas, cloth, paper and Mylar, and it’s clear that Shishkin is displaying different movements of her work from lithographs to the smaller drawings on Mylar.
Some of the canvases are large-scale, such as “SupremelyActualNotPotential” and “If God is for us who can be against us,” expansive with bold colors of a Franz Ackerman quality via quick brushstrokes of acrylic paint combined with chalk and pastel sticks.
The Mylar works are smaller and more delicate thanks to her use of crayon but Shishkin groups them together collage-style and as a result a story akin to café life via an Edgar Degas painting flows fluidly from the works.
I Surrender, Dear circles round the viewer but the impact is more magical, dreamlike than some bold, purely abstract assault of color and imagery.
One of the most joyful aspects of the exhibition is to stand at the far end of the gallery and experience Shishkin’s installation as a distant explosion of color. Then, walks towards the artworks, let the corner walls gather around you, and press close to the playful pictures. Amputated figures and copulating bodies spray blood and fluids in the most playful, perverse scenes imaginable. The feeling is childlike and innocent instead of erotic and it’s hard not to smile when gazing upon the drawings.
I Surrender, Dear, offers a rare and wonderful to Dasha Shishkin, the chance for many to experience her work for the first time and yet, also witness a comprehensive survey of her work.
Her first solo museum show may be far away from her Bushwick studio and her Williamsburg apartment but it travels beautifully; meaning that all of her artistic inklings, reflections and creative choices remain intact and complete in one museum gallery. Those lucky viewers are in for an adventure.
Dasha Shishkin’s I, Surrender Dear continues until April 29 at the Contemporay Arts Center (Lois & Richard Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art
44 East Sixth Street • Cincinnati, Ohio).
