Shoot the Lobster

SIRENS

NICOLETTE MISHKAN
DECEMBER 5, 2020 - JANUARY 10, 2021

Shoot the Lobster LA presents Sirens, a solo exhibition of paintings by Los Angeles based artist Nicolette Mishkan. An opening will be held Saturday December 5, from 1-7 PM.

From nautical lore to Hans Christian Andersen to Darryl Hannah, the mermaid is a perpetual and indelible piece of the cultural imagination. She’s a deadly tease. Her song is seductive, yet calming like a mother’s lullaby, and the last music many a mariner hears before his untimely demise. Her fin is simultaneously phallic and feminine, wet and flirtatious, yet seemingly impenetrable to earthbound creatures. She’s at home with the universe under the sea and lives in equilibrium with those beneath its surface, but she’s also curious and clumsily familiar with the dry world, at least as far as her upper-half can venture into it. She’s a union of harmonies whose cosmic balance is a little off. 

Sea legs, a sailor’s ability to walk steadily on the deck of a ship, are a necessity for men in nautical professions. They’re earned over time spent far from shore, exerting one’s mastery over the ocean and the mysterious and terrifying creatures that dwell beneath the surface. Sea legs may protect a man in confrontations with leviathans, krakens, and maneaters, but even the steadiest-legged seaman is helpless in the face of a finned siren. The mermaid is only breakable, tame-able, or domesticable if she is captured from the sea and forced onto dry land.

This is what we hear from the likes of ancient seamen, Hans Christian Andersen, and Brian Grazer, men barely-balanced on the decks of ships. The mermaid is everywhere, but the tongues that sing of her are largely male.

Nicolette Mishkan’s paintings are portals into a utopia where land or sea legs are not required to venture the totality of the globe, where men are nonexistent, where violence only exists in the pleasure of bondage or as a rite of spring. In her cosmology, the mermaid swims through the symbolic order, exploiting her duality to tickle, provoke, and entangle her established relationships with paternal consciousness. Her heroines and avatar possess a gaze equal and opposite to those who have previously subjected the siren: Frederic Leighton, John Waterhouse, Herbert James Draper, and more recently Michael Parkes and Damien Hirst.  

In Wedding Scene, 2020, Mishkan’s protagonist binds herself to both the heavens and depths in glorious, sunset-lighted concord through dolphin-enabled seaweed shibari. With Sashimi, 2020, a finned goddess presents herself submissively, and is elegantly severed and served to the viewer over a swamp that becomes a desert. Surf and Turf, 2020, depicts sister mermaids floating in a circle, one in the air and one ashore, mirroring each other in position. The airborne creature is partitioned into five pieces and draped like one of Dali’s clocks over an invisible, immortal coil. The muted, surreal setting is seductive, yet calming like a mother’s lullaby, inviting the viewer to become part of their world, or shipwreck upon what lies beneath. 

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Nicolette Mishkan (b. 1986) graduated from Otis College of Art and Design in 2008. A first-generation Iranian American, she lives and works in Los Angeles. Mishkan was included in When You Waked Up the Buffalo, 2020, at Nicodim Los Angeles, and will be featured in two upcoming group exhibitions at Jeffrey Deitch. Permaid, the faceless, black latex-clad Persian mermaid character she created and developed with Aeschleah DeMartino from 2014–2019, became an iconoclastic celebrity, and was featured in performative collaborations with the likes of Gagosian, Katy Perry, and the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, and garnered international crossover press. Sirens is her first solo exhibition.

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To make an appointment to see the exhibition, or for artwork or press inquiries contact us at contact@shootthelobster.com.