Female culture: visual art.

The “coloured-in drawings” of Dasha Shishkin.

We are not afraid for comparable lives [2011]

Dasha Shishkin is a Russian-born, New York- based visual artist, who works inside the grey area between painting and drawing. She tells Marina Cashdan in the April 2010 issue of Modern Painters:

“There is not much madness or method in the approach. Some materials are underdogs of an art shop or a studio — torn, wrinkled paper, ripped canvas, leftover fabric — and I feel their neglect. But it is not out of mercy and in no way a condescending step down that I use them. It is a “what if” and “why not” thought, along the lines of “equal opportunity” for art supplies.

Also, I don’t consider them or call them paintings but drawings, because that is what they are to me — colored-in drawings… I am still attached to line and eloquent silhouettes that line creates, leaving paint and colors to be fillers and not definers.”

My baby’s cooking in another man’s pan [2012]

I don’t care if I can’t understand you, but you can’t sit in the gutter all day [2012]

It takes money to feed pretty women [2009]

Dark angel of projectile vomiting [2011]

Please don’t leave pretty girls [2006]

[above 3 images: details from Desaparecido exhibition, 2011, Zach Feuer Gallery]

If less is more, nothing is everything [2001]
With the dark comes dinner, I hope [2011]

I enjoyed reading a pretty awesome “eliptical review” of her work by Andrew Berardini in Art Slant. [Please check it out here.]  Berardini imagines an encounter in a sleazy bar between Shishkin and some of her male gaze artist predecessors (Henry Darger, Robert Crumb, and George Grosz). He lightly and cleverly sends-up these artists’ use of the female body as a site for the projection of male psychological/political angst and places the fluid, decadent and subversive representations of the body that Shishkin has made in their lineage.

“[G]irls have their own way of being gross, bestial, sexy. We have our perversions and sufferings, self-inflicted and imposed. We, like you, can sketch them out, slashing each line, with each of us pouring out our own weird visions. Perhaps it’s time ladies got to pour out their own bizarre, elaborate fantasies and nightmares about our own bodies, men’s too if we feel like it. Purposeful in task, we can paint them with candy and wash them in acid.”

Ha! Ha! Totally dude, excellent point, but who are you calling “we”? 😉

Cath