Nicolette Mishkan
*Lethe’s Harem*, 2024-2025
Oil on linen
48 x 60 in121.9 x 152.4 cm

interview by Summer Bowie

What if death were just a blackout between this life and the next? With its memories wiped clean in a cycle of spiritual cleansing, your soul might carry only faint notions of who you once were, like a SIM card with a brand new hippocampus. Such is the gist of the River Lethe, an underworld tributary from ancient Greek mythology whose waters wash away all remembrance of one’s existence. In Lethe’s Tavern, the fabled Greek river becomes a watering hole where painter Nicolette Mishkan’s ego goes to slosh around, bifurcate, and eventually sing its swan song. Informed equally by Sufi mysticism wherein wine is used to symbolize the intoxicating effects of divine love, she annihilates her sense of individuality by eliminating any distinction between herself and others. Together, these figures revel in the ultimate surrender to their fate, a resplendent transcendence into the unknown where who she once was lies buried without even an epitaph. The following interview took place at Megan Mulrooney on the occasion of the exhibition’s closing and has been edited for length.

SUMMER BOWIE: I want to start by talking about the River Lethe—what it is and how it came to be the crux of this body of work.

NICOLETTE MISHKAN: I came across an essay on the River Lethe in Greek mythology one day, and I was really intrigued by this image of a river in the underworld where if you drink from it, it wipes your memory clean. You want to avoid drinking the water so that you can keep the memories from your previous existences and carry them into the next life. So, it feeds into this imagery of an eternal cycle—the forgetting and redoing and forgetting again.

Before that, I had been thinking about wine from a Sufi perspective and the belief that it brings you closer to the divine. I like the mixture of that imagery in terms of divine intoxication as a form of spiritual love and also the idea of dispersing your ego and memories and thoughts. Depending on the level of consciousness you bring into it, it'll either connect you with something higher or return you to the cycle of renewal.

BOWIE: It’s interesting in this way that you’re discouraged from drinking the water, but of course, we all come into the world with a fresh slate. So, these works propose a wonderful embrace of that surrender. I love the way these figures are experiencing moments of everything from folly to ecstasy to utter exhaustion. There’s an aspect of labor you can see that really speaks to the more challenging aspects of submission.

The show also makes reference to the Sufi concept of ‘fana,’ which has to do with ego death and connection to the divine. And it’s also the first show you’ve done where you appear as each and every figure. I like how you approach this idea of ego death in a very counterintuitive way, because you’ve lost all that makes you unique.

MISHKAN: Yeah, I mean from a practical standpoint, I wanted it to be consistent. And I like the idea of multiple selves that represent either your multiple potential realities or different timelines merging, or even just the idea that everyone is a reflection of you. Every work an artist makes is inevitably going to be a self-portrait. Plus, it’s easier because I’m always available..

BOWIE: Are you photographing yourself from multiple angles and then placing those in, or are you finding that you need certain angles as you’re in the process of creating the painting, and then going back and re-photographing?

MISHKAN: It’s both. It’s like, oh, I know what I want, so let me just…. It’s embarrassing. I set up the camera and I’m like, [assumes a few different poses] you know. And then I took videos and grabbed stills from those as well.

BOWIE: The movement aspect is really clear, so I can see the way that film stills would lend themselves well to these figures. One major recurrent theme across all of your works is the way that they empower people to connect to the divine feminine. Can you define what the divine feminine is for you?

MISHKAN: When I started the series, I was thinking of the role of wine according to the Sufis and then it branched out into other cultures and their relationships with wine. And then, I was thinking about this river as a trance into the subconscious, in this moon-like place. As I kept going, I got into more of this story of the feminine descent. Part of that is this cyclical period in everyone’s life, it happens a million times, where she’s forced to start over. Part of that is releasing all the attachments to who she is: I’m a mother, a daughter, a businesswoman, an artist—letting go of all those identity markers. It’s also about letting go of her attachment to a very patriarchal society. We’re raised in this logical, mathematical world that forces us to let go of what makes us feminine: our intuition, connection to our body, emotionality. These are the things that make women strong. Sometimes it just catches up with you and you have to evolve. And part of that evolution is the descent into your subconscious, facing certain things, letting go, coming back.

Nicolette Mishkan
*Lethe's Tavern*, 2024-2025
Oil on linen
48 x 60 in121.9 x 152.4 cm

BOWIE: The subject of female empowerment comes up a lot in your work, but I feel like your take on it is a direct reflection of not just being a woman, but being an Iranian-American woman.

MISHKAN: It’s just so ingrained. I grew up in America and I was never forced to cover up the way they are, but I still see instances where I’m doing that dance. They’re treated as second-class citizens, essentially, and it’s terrifying to see how a country can go so far backwards so quickly. We see the women over there fighting for rights that we have here, but we take it for granted because we don’t realize how fragile it is.

BOWIE: Right. The Woman, Life, Freedom movement is asking for something that we currently have in America. But, the far-right has already dismantled Roe v. Wade and defunded family planning clinics that provide everything from birth control to STD screening and pap smears. So, we may be allowed to expose more of our bodies, but the misogynistic foundation of Western society is always pulling back on the liberties that we assume are fixed because our grandmothers already fought for them and won.

MISHKAN: A lot of it comes from this religious mentality. You’ll see people who leave one extreme religion only to find another one with equally extreme practices. Coming back to the series, I want to appreciate the feminine and embrace her because I think that without that, we’re imbalanced, and you can see it all over the place. It’s very imbalanced; women are so repressed. And it has to get so extreme. Women have to go out there and cut their hair off. In Iran, they’re getting their eyes shot out and it’s all because of their hair.

BOWIE: The young women of Iran are fighting back in this way that is just unbelievably intrepid. It’s extremely humbling. But speaking of extremes, a lot of people don’t know about your previous practice as a performance artist and the character you called Permaid. Was that the genesis of this avatar that you found in the siren?

MISHKAN: Permaid was a project I did with my friend and it was just purely out of love. We didn’t really understand what we were doing. We would put this faceless latex mermaid out in the world and take photos and it was candid. But in the end, I realized it was a lot about learning to embrace yourself and all your differences and loving every part of yourself.

After that project ended, I really wanted to continue exploring the siren theme. And part of Permaid was this inherent S&M thing, which is just always in the back of my mind. It’s about sexuality whether I want it to be or not. But, it’s more this idea of what you consent to in your day-to-day life and how we live in a world where there’s no safe word. So, if you are aware of what you’re consenting to, you’re far more empowered. The mermaid is such a feminine symbol. She mirrors women in today’s society very well and the way that our strengths are held against us.

BOWIE: There’s an extremism about her in the sense that she’s faceless, and already, the mermaid is basically sexless. Yet, she is this symbol of sensuality and in many European seafaring mythologies she is a temptress who lures sailors to inclement, stormy waters. So, if you saw her it was a sign that you were going to die. Yet, Permaid’s facelessness really impedes her ability to beguile. There’s not an inch of skin exposed—it’s almost like a sexy burka. I imagine it was incredibly difficult to breathe in this costume.

MISHKAN: Oh yeah, it’s very psychological. You freak out while your face is covered and your breath gets short. It suffocates a little bit, but you just kind of breathe into it. It’s very weird. I’d be in that suit sometimes for a very long time. I imagine it’s similar to a burka, where you can see them, but they can’t see you. It's very dehumanizing and weird from a sensory perspective. It’s like a sensory deprivation tank. You can get zen with it and eventually you get used to it, but I didn’t really enjoy it.

BOWIE: There’s a compelling paradox with your body on full display and your complete anonymity. There’s a lot of symbolism there in terms of the female experience. And in these works, we can see traces of Permaid’s with the black latex mask, but now it’s a hood with her face exposed. She’s been liberated in a certain respect, but we’re reminded that it’s still her. Can we talk about your use of water in these works as a symbol of rebirth?

MISHKAN: I wanted to create a world that’s like this entrance back into the womb. And part of that approach was in these thin washes of paint that build up the darkness. Also, in a lot of literary symbolism, water, when it's out of control, can represent a sort of mental schizoid state. And I like the idea of water as a subconscious realm of collective thought progression. That’s where I imagined the heroine entering—in this deep subconscious shadow world.

Nicolette Mishkan
*Ritual of Forgetting*, 2024
Oil on linen
24 x 20 in61 x 50.8 cm

BOWIE: There are a couple other motifs that you play with that take the form of talismans, like the latex hoods and poppy flowers. Can you talk about those?

MISHKAN: The latex hoods throughout my paintings prior to this have always been my nod to S&M. But with this series, I wanted it to be a representation of the ego, like that last thing holding her together. And as the series keeps going, they start coming off. With the poppies, I was researching symbols for forgetting, and they started coming up. I like that intersection of this addictive, devotional, all-consuming vice.

BOWIE: You play a lot with this juxtaposition between inebriation and purification. There’s the Dionysian belief that wine brings you closer to the gods that you’re referencing, and then this mythology of the river Lethe making you forget—pulling you away from yourself.

MISHKAN: Yeah, the symbolism of wine comes up in so many different cultures. You have wine representing the blood of Christ. For the Zoroastrians, it represented the fire of the sun and a kind of substitute for blood. In a lot of cultures, wine is something that connects you to the divine or life force, and I like that idea. Intoxication is a process of stepping outside of yourself and connecting to something else. Like this, the heroine is sort of letting down her ego, she's letting down her walls, forgetting her disconnection with others, and reconnecting with her shadow side, as well as her instincts and intuition.

BOWIE: There’s several interesting art historical references that we see in this series, particularly Dorothea Tanning and Leonor Fini. Something I find really intriguing is not just your connection to them as Surrealist female painters that work with the body, and mortality, and nature. But on a personal level, Dorothea Tanning had this history of working in fashion illustration, much like you. And then with Leonor Fini, she had that famous photograph by Henri Cartier-Bresson, where she’s nude, bathing in water, and she has this very classical hourglass figure, much like your own, which is a relatively rarefied body type. Do you remember how you discovered either of their work?

MISHKAN: I'd say both of them were always kind of floating around as soon as I got internet access. I was coming across the imagery and it always really spoke to me. You look at it and sometimes you have no idea what's going on. It really touches a part of my brain. But I think Surrealism has historically been a place where women were taken seriously. It's a great entry point for any female artist because it's so welcoming for some reason.

BOWIE: I mean, part of me wonders how much of it had to do with how sexually liberated the female Surrealists were. Like, the narrative around Max Ernst discovering Dorothea Tanning through her Birthday painting, which was a topless self-portrait and then leaving Peggy Guggenheim shortly thereafter for her is pretty telling. Or the fact that Cartier-Bresson’s most famous and valuable photograph is of Leonor Fini nude with a shaved pubis. I want to talk about this palette you chose for these works because it’s very different from your previous works. These wine-dark reds, greenish grays, ashen roses. Where did the inspiration for this palette come from?

MISHKAN: I don’t remember why these colors happened. The imagery that came up in my research and imagination was in this palette and I really liked it, so I went with it. And as I kept going, I started to realize that it's actually really moldy. And I think mold speaks well to this idea of breakdown and regeneration. It wasn’t intentional, but it works.

Nicolette Mishkan
*Midnight Abyss*, 2024-2025
Oil on linen
24 x 36 in61 x 91.4 cm

BOWIE: [Gestures toward a painting] I love that one so much because she gets to this point where she almost can’t take it anymore. It reminds me of the last stage of child labor right before you start to push. I’m curious about the embodiment of the siren and how she guides your way of living.

MISHKAN: You know, at the end of the day I’m a very cheesy girl; I’m very cringy. I just like mermaids and I chose to lean into it. I always loved them as a kid and I still love them. She’s so endlessly fascinating and the more I think about her, the more dimensions she reveals to me. Whether it’s the way she’s historically demonized as representation of the whore, or valorized as the divine feminine—a woman who's strong in her emotions and intuition. She's a timeless symbol.

BOWIE: Do you drink while you paint?

MISHKAN: There was a period where sometimes I would drink the night before. There was something about the hangover that was interesting to lean into. And then after a while it wasn’t…

BOWIE: You can feel that with these. You can feel the ecstatic moments of drinking and the eventual burn out. Especially with that moment where you’re pouring yourself another drink and the version of yourself receiving it is like, this is a good idea.

MISHKAN: That’s what I’m doing when I’m drinking. I’m just really having fun with myself. But the addiction aspect is always floating in the back of my head. The addict is in me and I’ve dated so many of them. But I embrace it because there's something about the addict mentality that is passionate. I like the intensity. I even like the destructive aspect. I don't fight it. I just try to appreciate it. When it comes to these ideas of connecting with the divine, it’s both intoxicating and kind of delusional. If you’re drinking to forget, the cycle just repeats itself versus if you're celebrating, it's a different thing in my mind.

Nicolette Mishkan
*Limbic Override*, 2025
Oil on canvas
14 x 10 in35.6 x 25.4 cm

BOWIE: Are they doing both?

MISHKAN: In this series, I like the idea that you could read it a million different ways. Maybe she’s ending back where she started, or maybe her rebirth is leading to a positive transformation.

BOWIE: On the subject of rebirth and a certain feminine continuum, you originally learned to paint as a child because your mom taught oil painting and you used to sit through her classes. I'm curious how your mom feels about your painting practice?

MISHKAN: She’s very supportive. She’s super open-minded and liberal compared to a typical Iranian woman, but when I first sent her the list of work she was like, “Oh, there’s a lot of nudity, and I wanted to bring my friends.” And I was like, “Don't worry about it. You don’t have to bring them.” But then, she did anyway. And I do love that this is really my connection to her in a way. It’s so deeply a part of her that it’s part of me too. And she did teach me. I remember being super young and her being like, “Okay, here are your colors, start mixing.” And that's how I learned oil painting.

BOWIE: So, it sounds like you’re challenging her in a lot of ways and she’s growing from it in terms of pushing through that discomfort.

MISHKAN: Yeah. I mean, she’s also why I got into classical painting because that’s just what I grew up around. I was always in a house full of paintings of nude women and I didn’t realize that that’s kind of weird.

BOWIE: Just not as much self-portraiture happening, I imagine.

MISHKAN: No. There was a lot of Rococo and Neoclassical painting going on. It’s very Persian.

BOWIE: Right. That separation between artist and subject lends itself to a much less vulnerable practice.

MISHKAN: Exactly.