Mikela Sheskier with Androgynous Bulge & Maurice
Witch’s Kiss
Maurice, Baltimore, MD
Photography by Anonymous

Maurice presents, Witch’s Kiss, a solo presentation of new works by Mikela Sheskier (Prayers Zine), a Philadelphia-based social work student, multi-disciplinary artist, zine-maker, and curator. Sheskier’s visual practice is informed by her experience as a clinical researcher and practicum therapist, whether that be through neuro-imaging or art therapy in inpatient communities. She sources her images from old B-horror films, textbooks, bootleg Disney and Looney Tunes ephemera, heavy metal iconography, and the nostalgic tropes of sentimental American, popular culture. 

Androgynous Bulge is the experimental electronic duo of Hayden Right and J Brown. Based out of Baltimore, MD, the two employ the tools of electro-acoustics and various percussion elements in live performances and recorded media to construct a vehicle for an ecologically oriented drama. In genre-bending textures of rhythmic pulsing and syncopated noise, flora, fauna, and fungi are forced to seep out onto the dance floor.

Why do you choose to work on garments as opposed to traditional painting surfaces?

Aside from a preference for the material itself (I have always had more success drawing/stippling on clothes versus canvas) there is something exciting to me about imagining the garment moving through a space and the image fading/decaying over time and through wear. Knowing that a person might inhabit the garment also helps inform the composition of the piece, especially for the slips/negligees I have been making which are designed and tailored for a “woman’s” body. I like imagining that the casper pumpkin will accentuate someone’s hips or the Mars Attacks skull will naturally highlight someone's waist and tits. For this Halloween show specifically I also liked the way that the slips hung and floated in space like apparitions. There was something  ghostly to me about the slips swimming in space without a body filling them. 

I think this preference also stems from a lack of formal training and comfort with other materials and mediums. While I love sculptural work and have always wanted to paint more diligently, most of my actual “training” in any art capacity is in sewing and costume design. My mom was trained as a seamstress and costume designer (she worked on the original costumes for CATS on Broadway which I find incredible/scary) and so I learned to sew at a super young age. I have always been drawn to creating textiles and working with cloth and I think my shirts, slips, etc are a natural extension of that. I imagine that these might be costumes for some absurd play or celebration but that the occasion hasn’t revealed itself yet. 

Why do you gravitate towards specific kinds of images?

I have always been attracted to vaguely medicalized imagery both through my experience in neuroscience and my deep appreciation for metal iconography. A lot of “hardcore” imagery for flyers and album art is pulled directly from 19th century pathology texts and from medieval torture/medicinal instruction manuals and templates. I like to contrast that imagery like a collage with warmer and/or more nostalgic images from my childhood (or an imagined childhood) that are also mimicked in the material structures of institutions and other medical settings (I think of every treatment facility I have worked at that has relied in some capacity on disney images and other visuals from childhood - I think to elicit a sense of ease and comfort in patients). Through free-handing/recreating these images and bastardizing them in that way I find that the drawing looks more perverted and that this process imbues the image with (an even more) sinister quality and cynicism. I think collaging images in this way is guided by my work making zines and doing art therapy both in the role of a therapist (and while hospitalized/enrolled as a patient or client). I wish I still had all of my drawings from treatment - I wonder if they would look like my recent drawings and shirts. I made an entire zine in one particularly funny/bad manic episode on anti-psychiatry and children’s toys and games. It would be exciting to translate that into a wearable garment.