Whitney Art Works is sort of holding off on their usual first friday openings for the BLUE HAMMER performace starting thursday april 30th (I am going and I am SUPER excited!). But on MAY 7th (drumroll please) my favorite little Greek, Elianna Mesaikos, is going to be in the back room of the Whitney Art Works displaying a whole years worth of hardwork and out-of-control talent. Displayed are a couple of pieces, and below is an excerpt from the Whitney Artworks site about her work. My Pal Molly Levine (another crazy talented person) will have some paintings in the front room as well as works from Diana Cherbuliez, Jaime Gili, and Michael McFalls.
If urban planning is the arranging and organizing of environments to reflect the values of a society, then Maine College of Art alum and New York City native, Elianna Mesaikos is a crack-pot architect, arranging and organizing animals, symbols and flowers to express a subjective sense of beauty and order. These collections and fragments of things may be drawn with clarity but they remain enigmatic. It is hard to place the time period of a scrap of garment. Animals and plants that shouldn’t exist together frolic while modern design elements are combined with Rococo flourishes. The line work in her drawings is delicate and humorous reflecting the artist’s attitude. She calls this work “a romantic tragedy… a flirtation between fact and fiction” and a “maudlin tale of passionate wildlife” with equal parts sincerity and hilarity. An artist who once set out to make a drawing of everything, Mesaikos allows layers and layers of influences and symbols into her work. The drawings are gorgeous in an austere palette but lush with detail and information. Equally as refreshing is the extreme use of scale, drawings barely larger than an inch hold their own with enormous pieces. Despite the quirky themes and the artist’s playful descriptions one gets a sense that there is something deeper at play, perhaps who or what is actually embodied in the “portraits” of the “valiant” and the “feeble” that Mesaikos mentions in the titles of a series of drawings. The artist is an inventor of a deeply personal hierarchy, a classification of life that we are fortunate to peek at.
–Celeste Parke
