07 Sep Trickster makes this world (for Lewis Hyde)

Source Credit:  Content and images from Wall Street International Magazine by .  Read the original article - https://www.meer.com/en/82567-trickster-makes-this-world-for-lewis-hyde

Bookstein Projects is pleased to announce
an exhibition of recent paintings by Elena
Sisto. This is the artist’s fourth solo-show
with the gallery.

Painter Elena Sisto has often focused on the
agency of women in her work over five
decades. But since the beginning of the
pandemic she has painted intimate smaller
works in black and white (with occasional
flashes of red and silver). In this exhibition,
women become gods and heroes in scenes
based on classical myths. But these are
hardly straightforward images. Sisto uses
myth, monochrome, and feminism as
building blocks to construct deeply personal narratives. Beauty and meaning emerge in unexpected
ways.

She calls her show Trickster makes this world, in homage to a book with that title by Lewis Hyde. He
writes about trickster figures like Hermes, who Hyde argues emerged just as ancient Greek society was
transitioning from a gift society to one based on money and financial exchange. “He is the god of
commerce”, Sisto says, “the god of exchange–of crossroads, of hinges, or of any place where
information or ideas from different groups intermingle. He’s also the patron of thieves”.

In these paintings, ideas accordingly intermingle with a wild charm. Figures change scale, shapes evolve
before your eyes, backgrounds become foregrounds, and meaning is deliberately elusive. Everywhere
is an undertone of humor. Hermes the trickster appears frequently, a shape-shifter intent on defying
convention.

Sisto eliminates descriptive and anecdotal detail, to construct figurative paintings that remain
abstract, and are best experienced intuitively. “I like the paintings to be open to projection, and to mean
something different each time you look at them”, she explains.

Her roots are in the New York School, and also in cartooning. Both are at play here, as the paint itself
takes on personality and character. For Sisto, meaning arises out of process. She has little idea what a
given painting is about until it’s finished–sometimes not until months later.

“I’m enveloping myself in a mythic space and sometimes conflicting stories, and then just painting”, she
explains. “Making a painting is like finding one small island of coherence within a larger chaos. I’m not
trying to be in control, because I want the painting to draw me along and tell me what to do. Reaching a
precarious but convincing unity is the goal”.

Earlier paintings and drawings featured imagined collaborations and confrontations between iconic
cartoon women, including Betty Boop, Olive Oyl, Nancy, and Daisy Mae. Then Sisto read The Secret
History of Wonder Woman, by Jill Lepore, where she learned that William Moulton Marston based his
character in part on ancient Amazons. That was Sisto’s route into Greek and other ancient myths,
which so richly feed this new body of work.

She is not alone in reinterpreting and extending these myths. Contemporary writers including Margaret
Atwood, Pat Barker, Madeline Miller, and Emily H. Wilson have all sought to re-center the female
perspective in classical myths.

Sisto’s figures, however, are often of indeterminate gender. She presents the viewer with abstracted
and androgynous silhouettes, black and white figures that torque in and out of positive and negative
space. Hermes’ mischievous nature is a guiding spirit.

She talks about “intimate intersections of large forces” in these paintings. The characters seem to be
living in a space that is charged with energy, or mutating as they pass through it.

Some of those forces emerge in patterns reminiscent of textiles. Sisto cites influences including her
grandmother’s antique Persian carpets, the youthful fall she spent studying with a master weaver on a
New Mexico Navajo reservation, and Henri Matisse’s dynamic use of ornament.

Elena Sisto (b. 1952) splits her time between New York, NY and Rhinebeck, NY.She received her BA from
Brown University and studied at the New York Studio School. She has had solo museum shows at the
Maier Museum, the Greenville County Museum, the Katzen Museum and the Miami Dade Museum of
Art + Design. Sisto was included in the 43rd Corcoran Biennial and groups shows at the Wexner Center,
the Weatherspoon Gallery, the Krannert Art Center, the Hunterdon Museum, the Newark Museum,
UCLA Wight Gallery and the Katonah Museum. She’s the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships
including the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, the Inglis Griswold Nelson
Prize from the National Academy Museum and School, the George Rickey Foundation Grant and has
been a fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center, Yaddo and the Millay Colony.

Source Credit:  Content and images from Wall Street International Magazine by .  Read the original article - https://www.meer.com/en/82567-trickster-makes-this-world-for-lewis-hyde