Today’s post is a follow-up to our recent announcement of “It’s a Luxury to Look Back,” the solo exhibition by Angela Miskis (BFA 2013 VCS) that’s on display at the Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning through July 29. Angela recently sent us a copy of an exhibition essay by VCS Department Chair Tom Huhn that I thought I’d share here, along with some images from the opening reception on June 30. There’s still plenty of time to see the exhibition before it closes, and to attend one of the remaining Saturday public programs with Angela.

Here is Tom Huhn’s essay, illustrated with images of several of the paintings in the exhibition, followed by a gallery of images from the reception.

The exhibition of works by Angela Miskis is a generous and revealing survey of the arc of her artistic practice over the past 13 years and up to just now. Here we witness the growth and expansion of her painting practice over the last many years, and, in reading a collection of Angela’s artist statements beginning with her college days, we come to appreciate the dynamic interplay between her paintings and her self-understanding of what the work is about. I relish being able to toggle between reading her words and looking at the works. Angela provides us privileged access to the intimate relationship between her thinking about her work and the works themselves.

Two things strike us immediately regarding Angela’s output; the first is the rich continuity that flows through all the paintings, regardless how abstract or figurative, and the second thing, still more surprising, is that there is so much variety and experimentation within this same continuity. That is unexpected, and it resonates with the realization that no matter how disparate we might find the products or actions or words of any individual, there is, whether apparent or not, some deep kinship within and between all the expressions that body forth from any one of us. I find that this resonance in Angela’s work provides a deep comfort in the things that bind us to one another as well as those that connect within each of us, or we might even say: those things that collect and serve to bind us with ourselves. Let me see if I can’t pull on a few of the threads that traverse the whole of Angela’s work and try to name them so that they might become still more apparent.

The work fills the canvas in each painting, as if there is not quite enough space to contain what needs to be expressed and shown. Earnest of 2014 does just this: it knows no frame and expands beyond any framing to fill the room from floor to ceiling. One of the most prominent threads in Angela’s oeuvre is the ease with which the paintings move back and forth between abstraction and figuration. For many years Angela took herself to be a painter of abstraction, of not resorting to representations or figures to make the picture do something. Painting abstractly came easily to Angela because of the joy she finds in pushing the paint around on a surface. Confining the play of paint to a recognizable shape or figure seemed unnecessary given the easy richness of the material and color that she makes of the paint itself. Consider the 2010 work, Five Senses, in which we find a riot of color and fluidity in the pleasure of sensuousness. Or the large painting, 30 Seconds, from 2013, where the vapor cloud at the top of the painting moves quickly beyond the upper frame and seems as if the steamy cloud might well be hoisting the picture itself skyward. Just as the frames of her paintings cannot contain all that needs doing within them, so too do many of the shapes and forms within the paintings appear to be unable to contain themselves. It’s as if the paint all too often wants to overcome the resistance of the shapes that serve to make boundaries.

This feels like exuberance, the excess of sensation, the vision which does not want to be contained by rigid boundaries and recognizable shapes. The exuberance and bursting-of-the-bounds that we find in the earliest works comes to a somewhat different expression in two works from 2018, White Exit and Highlighter Pink, wherein we find the same quantity of dynamic energy but now more contained within both the frame of the picture as well as the whole shapes that interact with one another on the surface. These two pictures reveal the extent to which Angela’s practice now harnesses the exuberance of paint and color into compositions that no longer gesture with leaps beyond the frame. These are contained, composed explosions of color and joy.

This trajectory of containment and composition we find continuing in the 2019 works Sediments (Memories) and Closer and Closer. In both these works the figures appear still more firmly bounded and certain in their shapes. But so too note that the figures now float in front of what appears to be a fluid backdrop of horizons. It’s as if Angela has wrestled with and succeeded in separating two distinct spheres: one is the dynamic fluidity of paint and color, and the other is the boundaries that give rise to the composed wholes of shapes and figures. In looking again and again at Angela’s most recent works of 2021 and 2022 we might find the word odyssey as the most apt term to describe her long and continuing practice. One Way to One Chance and Nine Years to Say Goodbye are both extremely large pieces, as if Angela has resolved the question of how to contain things within a frame by expanding the frame until it reaches the size of a wall. These are monumental pieces, they want to be on the scale of the billboard, and we find that this very successful upscaling also implies that Angela’s works now need a larger and more public space in which to be seen. It’s as if this first long odyssey of Angela’s painting career has delivered her just in time to the public place where we now meet her. She and her paintings bring us joy, color, movement, and life, composed in a spectacular balance that greets and affirms us precisely as we find ourselves: enlarged and together.

“It’s a Luxury to Look Back,” will be on display through June 29, 2022 at the Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning, with Angela Miskis hosting public programs at the center each Saturday through July 23. For more information, check out our previous blog post and the JCAL website.