NICOLETTE MISHKAN

The two paintings on view are from her latest body of work depicting underwater mermaids, wearing caps to hide their hair, immersed in underwater realms where magna and underwater volcanos explode around them. Loosening the brushstrokes from her earlier style, these mermaids seem to be keepers of the deep—'The Protection Circle’ features a lone mermaid who lays calmly and seductively enshrined in a circle of underwater flames. 

Nicolette Mishkan (b. 1986, Los Angeles) graduated from Otis College of Art and Design in 2008. A first-generation Iranian American, she lives and works in Los Angeles. 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.