She Opened Her Ear to the Great Below is Elena Sisto's current show at Pamela Salisbury in Hudson, New York. Sisto immerses us in a mythic landscape populated by figures of Mesopotamian matriarchy. Basic to the shifting scenes of her inventive imagery is her constant reconfiguration of the conventions of “field and frame” defined by art historian Meyer Schapiro as the material basis of the “image sign.” Sisto distorts the regular grid of perspective with skewed internal frames, spiraling vortices, decorative borders, and layered compartments, and uses metallic pigments and milky washes of Flashe to generate a heavy, translucent atmosphere. Working on a small scale, her lively brushstrokes endow a limited world with internal animation, depicting water, the transparent draperies of goddesses, and, when appropriate, celestial light. Varying her monochromatic grays with textural effects, infusions of red and scratches of white, Sisto envisions a common origin of visual and poetic signs in the primal realm of material marks.
Sisto’s figures and their rudimentary narratives incorporate the graphic conventions of cartoons, which she has explored since her early works of the 1980s, combined with the conventions of Sumerian cylinder seals. With the introduction of figures based in ancient Greek and Egyptian art in 2021, she imposed an increasing standardization on their bodies, a caricature exaggeration combining extreme, inventive flexibility in their legs and arms – indebted to Picasso’s bathers – with a corresponding diminution in their heads. Reduced to a sort of degree zero of representation, these birdlike heads, adorned with helmets or other attributes, are rendered in clusters of carefully applied dots, primordial marks like the blobs Philip Guston painted in his transition to cartoon imagery. As if displayed in an archaeological museum, her tiny images on eight-inch panels demand close looking; her depiction of Sumerian deities takes on didactic implications, demanding concentrated attention and implying an increasingly internalized vision.
Envisioning the origins of articulated thought in a poetic fusion of drawing and marking, Sisto enters the realm of origin myths, of Hesiod’s Cosmogony and the Epic of Gilgamesh, a territory that twentieth-century poet Charles Olson claimed when he read "The Song of Ullikummi," a poem translated from Akkadian, at the University of California Poetry Conference in Berkeley in 1965. Olson dedicated his reading to Ezra Pound, responding to Pound’s embrace of Asian languages. Unlike the patriarchal Olson, however, Sisto seeks out the sources of female agency, and depicts the first recorded poet, who was a Sumerian priestess (who "opens her ear"), in "She Who Wrote" (2024). But both Sisto and Olson seek mythic synthesis in contemporary life, as Olson put it, “the original visionary experience of having been you."
The small work that lends the show its enigmatic title, "She Opened Her Ear to the Great Below," (2024) could be just such a vision: in his talk, Olson makes several references to William Blake, whose interweaving of darkness and enlightenment in both words and images is relevant to Sisto’s. Here, the suggestion of immersive sound evokes a sublime vastness attendant to mythological time and space. The work sets a checkerboard grid within the downward spiral of a giant ear, veiled in tracings of wash, like taffeta, to suggest a luminous layer of sound waves; glimpses through black squares of the grid reveal sections of mesh netting over dark depths, an abyssal drain, while over the center floats a tiny winged figure – like many of the characters here, an avatar of the artist.
Sisto assumes a more formal narrator’s role in the cartoon-like grid of "The Stories" (2024), asserting her agency in boundary shifting, inscribing in scratches like graffiti the names of mythical beings, apparently randomly, across the frames of their compartmentalized images, and breaking one figure in two. Like Blake, she portrays deities with their attributes – the poised, frontal nudity of "Inanna" (2024), the assertive strides of "Amphitrite" (2022), with her boats and fish, and of "Goddess of Love and War" (2024), with her stylized Mesopotamian clouds, which assert unambiguous power.
She Opened Her Ear to the Great Below was on view at Pamela Salisbury Gallery (362 1/2 Warren Street, Hudson, New York) through May 11. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.
Elena Sisto, Ningal, 2023, mixed media on panel, 10 x 10 inches