Processing Plant
May 11th, 2011
Desaparecido at Zach Feuer is Dasha Shishkin’s fourth solo show in New York, where she restores her drawings toward uniform seriality and connective imagery. As if diagramming the tenuous distinction between “drawing” and “painting,” she works on both sides of translucent Mylar, often (though not exclusively) drawing on one side and painting on the other, dry and wet facing opposite compass points.
That misleadingly makes it sound like formalist abstraction. Demure about its perversity, the imagery throughout the 20 or so works includes densely composed congregations of malnourished sociopaths, prison surveillance vantage points, and floor plans so fragmented that they buckle into cracked vignettes. Occupying institution-scaled interiors resembling spas/baths and restaurants/cafeterias, the 100% women inhabitants leisurely chat with each other while smoking cigarettes, while others indifferently dismember selected sisters, who themselves are fully conscious and conversing till the cleaver makes its final chop. Faces are sparsely articulated, as wan as Hergé’s Tintin on painkillers, though emotive engagement wriggles forth from the posture of the wasted bodies.
This society of deranged women – cool, not hysteric; industrious, not degenerate – has achieved the gyno-topia: communal living independent of males. Simultaneously, it has regressed to the savage disorder of cannibalism, harnessing and directing members’ consuming drives inward. All regulated and disbursed from the kitchen: due to no evident desperation, the women slice, dice, and butcher each other; but they do it with bureaucratic ardor and calm. What should be gory bloodbath seems as innocuous as mutual grooming. And where it isn’t explicitly illustrated, the carnage is implicitly pervasive. Food prep haunts each fetishistic protuberance, and each act of grasping, cutting, pinching, tugging, and other treatment of matter, itself subsumed as flesh.
To Serve Man. In steaming piles, like mussels or dim sum.
(But then, what does it mean when these piles contain stray phalluses?)
Dasha’s handiwork encompasses the neurotic dissonance of the factory barbarism (barbarism begins at home). She boldly streaks her garish palette in haphazard curtains, indiscriminately permeating the figures, though brakes for patterns, dutifully “painting in” wireframe chairs and the tiled floors. Her decisive lines do not flinch as they confidently delineate contours and appendages, yet they seem blinking and twitchy, like a nervous teen or outback tweaker.
