Megan Mulrooney is happy to current Lethe’s Tavern, a solo exhibition of work by Los Angeles based mostly artist Nicolette Mishkan, on view via June 29, 2025. The scene is mythic however acquainted: a half-submerged bacchanal, a hang-out for the wandering self. In Lethe’s Tavern, intoxication is each topic and state — a spot the place reminiscence slips sideways and the place our bodies gleam with an otherworldly softness. Mishkan’s figures glisten in states of liquid consideration as if in a trance: lips parted, eyes closed or doubled, flesh blurred on the edges as they dissolve into water or smoke. She captures not fairly a dream, and never fairly demise, however slightly the fevered pause between the 2.
The exhibition’s title references the traditional river Lethe, the mythological river of forgetfulness that winds via the Greek underworld, however her imaginative and prescient reaches additional, into Center Japanese mysticism, the place wine overflows in Sufi mystic poetry as a logo of ecstatic give up, annihilation of the ego, and divine intoxication. Her figures, iterations of the artist herself as mermaid, are of this custom: mythic, female, and fractured. They hover someplace between the sirens of Homer and the washing scenes of Nineteenth-century Orientalist portray, drawing much less from the French artists who fantasized the East than from their supply supplies, reentering the bathhouse as each its oracle and its ghost.
Rendered in oil on linen, the works are steeped in a narcotic palette: wine-dark reds, ashen roses, greenish greys. Mishkan’s method balances the anatomical precision of academicism with the fluid drift of devotional portray. Limbs curl and vanish into translucent washes; our bodies seem to floor and submerge directly. There may be directly an artwork historic present operating via the works, notably the wealthy interiority of Symbolism (Moreau, Redon) and the mythic surrealism of Leonor Fini and Dorothea Tanning, and an curiosity within the ultra-contemporary disorienting results of self-imaging.
All through the exhibition, a set of recurring objects anchor the visible subject: a fallen glass, poppy petals, latex hoods, decanters with Mesopotamian goddesses carved into them. These are talismans as a lot as props — fetish objects within the non secular sense anchoring work that aren’t scenes however spells.
