present global art gallery sheila isham press release

352 S. Nova Road
Old St. Augustine Village
Gamble Place at Spruce Creek
Daytona Beach, Florida 32114
www.moas.org


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The Museum of Arts and Sciences in Daytona Beach presents
Cosmic Expressions by Sheila Isham
February 29 - April 27, 2008

The Museum of Arts and Sciences is pleased to present a retrospective survey
of cosmic paintings by Sheila Isham. As a painter, Isham incorporates
knowledge gained directly from masters in Chinese calligraphy and Indian
philosophy and creates expressive cosmograms which call forth the mythic
power of traditional imagery. In her most recent body of work, Cosmic
Earth/Oasis Series, Isham finds an oasis of empowered peacefulness in yin-
yang arrangements of the heads of animals. Here, the power of the beast—
whether monkey, eagle or wildcat—is let loose, but is simultaneously resolved
in equilibrium.
Isham’s animals emerged in her work in the 1980s, after a long period as an
abstract painter. The figurative painting emerged from living in Haiti, an earth
culture, for a long period of time. Absorbing the Haitian’s bond with animals
and the spirit world brought a new energy to her work as it gradually evolved
mythically. In her Cosmic Bull Series, painted in the early 1990s, that iconic
animal floats through space as a comforting guide, protector and guardian of
inner strength.
The mythic quality of Isham’s work is ultimately the result of her having lived
abroad, in Germany, Russia, China, India, and Haiti over many years. In her
foreign residencies, Isham studied and absorbed traditional and indigenous
ways of making art, especially how to invest a traditional genre with a modern
economy of technique. Her respect for these traditions explains why there is
no condescension to the “wildness” of animals in her work: Isham values the
animal as a philosopher would see it: In Isham’s animal art, all is mutual
respect. Thus, in the background of Isham’s animals reside the intense
metaphoric depth of the theriomorphic sculpture of ancient Egypt, the
cosmological vitality of Chinese dragons, Hindu zoomorphic deities, medieval
Islamic censers, Native American totem symbols, and particularly German
expressionistic dream-beasts.
The pictorial space occupied by Isham’s menagerie in part derives from her
absorption of 20th century abstraction. In her Mythic Scroll (1981), Isham
created a vision of a mysterious landscape filled with visions of bestiary and
architectural wonders. The zero-gravity airiness of this world reappears in the
Mythical Escapades (1992), where dogs and birds jump and fly as sprightly as if
they had leaped from a Minoan frieze. Isham’s animals first emerged from deep
within their habitats, in the hallucinatory Beasts (1986), and in the unsettling
encounters of the Cosmic Myth Series (1985), where one must engage more
directly a creature like a gorilla or a bear. Cosmic Flight features birds again,
suddenly scared skyward, and then in 1989 the Cosmic Bull Series begins, the
bulls surprisingly calm, even docile, envisioned once again on a Lascaux-like
cave, only this time inside the artist’s mind. Finally, in the most recent Cosmic
Earth series, Isham seeks to find still deeper intimacy and energy in animals.
Heads are arrayed as if seen through a kaleidoscope, or as if one had come
upon a dense cluster of them lying secretly in a nest: the animality explodes on
the canvas, as if disturbed by sight itself.
Alexander Borovsky, Curator of Contemporary Art at the Russian State Museum
in St. Petersburg, has remarked that, “Isham is seriously and unplayfully
focused on both spirituality and bodily presence, on both order and chaos, on
both the outer and the inner cosmos.” Isham cites Kandinsky as her original
inspiration. Throughout her career, she has explored the expressive power of
the liminal zone between abstraction and figuration. In her attempt as a
Western painter to manage the incorporation of Eastern techniques, she has
also made use of Kandinsky, Chagall, Marc, and others, in order to fashion
compositions that bring out the energy hidden beneath each form.
Sheila Isham has been exhibiting her work since the 1960s. She was exhibited
at the Corcoran Museum of Art, Washington, D.C., Albright Knox Art Gallery,
Buffalo, New York, the Museum of Modern Art, New Orleans, and the National
Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C. (2005). She also exhibited her
work at the Russian State Museum, St. Michael’s Palace, St. Petersburg, Russia
in 2004, on the occasion of which a book, Sheila Isham, with text by Alexander
Borovsky, was published. A Works on Paper exhibited traveled through India,
sponsored by USIA, in 1989, and the Cosmic Earth Bull Series traveled through
Europe and Russia, 1992-1999. Isham has exhibited at French & Company, Ruth
Siegel Gallery and The Gregory Gallery, New York.
Sheila Isham graduated from Bryn Mawr College, Pennsylvania, and studied art
abroad in Berlin, Hong Kong, Moscow and Haiti, with interim residence in
Washington, D.C. She currently resides in Sagaponack and Southhampton, New
York.