Nicolette Mishkan | Slow Motion Siren Sex

Nicolette Mishkan is a multidisciplinary artist living and working in Los Angeles. Mishkan received her BFA in Fashion Design from the Otis College of Art and Design in 2008. With a hand influenced by painting lessons from her mother in childhood and her life-drawing training for fashion illustration, her figures are at once precise and sketchy; in her resemblance, she composes individual and group portraits that welcome translucent traces and washy palettes. Often embodying the form of a mermaid, Mishkan navigates the hybridity of her myriad creativity, fetish, identity, and fantasy, from her sensations of control and craze while dressed in latex bondage gear to her experience of living as a first-generation American in an Iranian family. In her most recent series, she steers her swarm of self-imaged sirens into Lethe—a river in the underworld of Greek mythology, which, if imbibed from, leaves drinkers with wiped memories and parched mouths. Lithe and haunting, her nereids succumb to the bacchanals of an intersectional mysticism—blurring references from Sufi poets’ praise of wine as an ego-annihilating elixir to Dionysus’ belief that wine brought mortals closer to the gods. Drenched in the depths of Lethe’s snaking murky waters and doused with overturned coupes of plum colored wine, her creatures glisten and glare with the sinister iridescence of a black pearl—a collective, labyrinthine feminine whose psyche spirals through vanity, liberty, escape, volition, plight, and ecstasy ad infinitum.

BJ Panda Bear: Your work has long straddled the Hellenistic and futuristic or utopian and dystopian. Yet, your recent series offers meditation on seemingly contrasting worlds and unifies them, presenting silent, timeless tranquility amongst the chaos. How did you find yourself entering this space?

Nicolette Mishkan: I learned how to paint from my mother, an artist and art teacher who surrounded her studio with paintings by John Singer Sargent, William-Adolphe Bouguereau, and Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema. Often acting as her model, I saw how she tapped into intuition, sensation, and emotionality—drawing from historical references with nuance. In my own work, I like to fuse references from disparate places ranging from astronomy reports, to mythology, New-Age-Healer YouTube videos, audiobooks, psychology, and AM radio. My paintings are not tethered to a particular time, space, or reference; they are fantastical worlds of my own making.

BJ: Your work connects mermaids to various religious ethnographies—especially from an Iranian, Persian diaspora—and the work of Peter Chung, who created AEon Flux. How do you see these two iconic visions combining, and how did you process it? What are their common attributes? 

NM: Both human and animal, mermaids encapsulate an innate beauty, untamed sexuality, and destructive nature—a feral, exotic femininity. As a first-generation Iranian American, I have long identified with the siren’s existence between worlds and often asked myself what it means to be caught across cultures—raised in an environment neither entirely Iranian nor American. When thinking about mermaids, I cannot help but correlate the sea to the feminine and the land to the masculine—observing the struggle for any fluid, female embodiment to survive in a rigid, male body politic. In Iran, women are subjugated to extreme gender apartheid laws, a patriarchal climate in which they must perpetually and resiliently fight for their freedom. In the United States, while we can show our hair, choose what we wear, work in any profession, share naked pictures, or own our own businesses, we face an internalized, systemic struggle against patriarchy. Growing up in Los Angeles, I stayed up late to watch Liquid Television, an animation showcase on MTV where I caught glimpses of Chung’s assassin, AEon Flux. As a kid, I didn’t understand the show’s content, but in AEon, I identified this hybrid nature and was completely mesmerized—her scanty bondage getup, her fashion-illustration proportions, her raven black hair—choppy and curling rather than cascading and blown-out. She was an avatar of strength and independence; I had never seen anything like her.

BJ: How have you conceived of the mermaid in its various cultural contexts—both visions of sirens and postmodern takes on what a woman in control looks like? Do you see this figure as a mother or a daughter? Lover or fighter? Is she in control or in submission? 

NM: Correlating the mythological being into a postmodern trope, I recognize the siren as a powerful dominatrix, one who consciously and unapologetically creates her own fantasies and perceives her mutable body as natural and complete. She is often feared; she is never trusted; her voice is considered a weapon; her sexuality is seen as a threat. Like a switch, she embraces contradiction. She fluctuates between strength and weakness; her erotic charge is complex; she is boldly inconsistent and unpredictable; she bends to her own will. In a world hell-bent on controlling her, she firmly grasps the cliff’s edge at the brink of her own extinction.

BJ:  In the past, we have discussed this subject matter as a form of nostalgia for a world you didn’t grow up in but are very familiar with. What type of ownership or confrontation with identity do you express in the worlds you build, and how they might echo your unique heritage? 

NM: Nostalgia manifests in my work as longing—a desire for an imagined past or future rather than the present. In this new series, I situate my sirens in Lethe—the “river of oblivion” in the underworld of Greek mythology, which, if imbibed from, leaves drinkers with wiped memories and insatiable thirst. In my Bacchanalian scenes of mermaids sipping this mossy, murky, moldy-hued amnesiac water, I sense my own psychic mutability, personal reincarnation, and ancestral churning. My sirens are situated in an intersectional mysticism composed of my own making between the East, West, and cosmos—blurring references from Sufi poets’ praise of wine as an ego-annihilating elixir to Dionysus’ belief that wine brought mortals closer to the gods. Reflecting on my Iranian-American heritage, I think a lot about the precise culture you were raised in as “the water you were swimming in”—ingrained norms that are difficult to identify, question, and reckon with. It took me a long time to unpack these deeply embedded psychological beliefs about women’s and men’s roles and sexuality. Perhaps my fascination with the siren archetype is a response to the effect of being told throughout my youth that a woman’s worth is confirmed through becoming a wife and mother. Sure, these roles were framed as characteristics of strength—the woman as the foundation of a successful family—but unlike my sirens, these women’s values were almost always obscured by a veil of submission.

BJ: How has your foundation in fashion design informed the way you adapted to painting in regard to technique and discipline? The latex hood that you previously examined in the Permaid project is still a prevalent stylistic motif that has become a hallmark of your work.

NM: In technique, I would say that my background in fashion illustration brings a precise, sketchy feeling to my hand; in layering paint, I embrace the translucent and washy. In style, the question brings me back to AEon Flux and the ways in which latex gear concisely conjures the simultaneously lustrous, mysterious, sensual, liberated, composed, and crazed nature of the female psyche. When I depict a group of sirens, they are meant to illustrate a labyrinthine personification of a singular self, and—through my sirens’ latex hoods, or AEon’s body-clutching thigh-high boots—I savor that embrace of paradox, a femme persona that refuses to sacrifice her autonomy and sexuality for the fear of her objectification.

BJ: Where do you see yourself in the landscape of Los Angeles-based painters and the overall performance of being a painter and artist in our time? And how do you personally connect your practice to more universal themes like mysticism and new and old worlds?

NM: One of the beautiful things about Los Angeles is that the city is fertile ground for New-Age ideas. Here, I sense that artists feel more comfortable moving at their own pace and exploring multi-hyphenate creative practices, compared to other cities where there is more pressure to follow market trends. Over the course of time, female figuration in painting will cycle in and out of popularity, but I feel committed to exploring this subject matter for as long as it continues to generate new meaning for me. In LA, new ages and old worlds are perpetually colliding, a present that mystically recycles time and space. In contrast to religion, I believe that mysticism is knowledge that is derived through personal practice, contemplation, and experience. Like my creative practice, it is an intimate, individual gesture of embodiment.

Intro by Anna Bane

Interview by BJ Panda Bear