Nicolette Mishkan (b. 1986, Los Angeles, CA) is an artist living and working in Los Angeles. Mishkan received her BFA in Fashion Design from the Otis College of Art and Design in 2008. With a hand influenced by painting lessons from her mother in childhood and her life-drawing training for fashion illustration, her figures are at once precise and sketchy; in her resemblance, she composes individual and group portraits that welcome translucent traces and washy palettes. Often embodying the form of a mermaid, Mishkan navigates the hybridity of her myriad creativity, fetish, identity, and fantasy, from her sensations of control and craze while dressed in latex bondage gear to her experience of living as a first-generation American in an Iranian family. In her most recent series, she steers her swarm of self-imaged sirens into Lethe—a river in the underworld of Greek mythology, which, if imbibed from, leaves drinkers with wiped memories and parched mouths. Lithe and haunting, her nereids succumb to the bacchanals of an intersectional mysticism—blurring references from Sufi poets’ praise of wine as an ego-annihilating elixir to Dionysus’ belief that wine brought mortals closer to the gods. Drenched in the depths of Lethe’s snaking murky waters and doused with overturned coupes of plum colored wine, her creatures glisten and glare with the sinister iridescence of a black pearl—a collective, labyrinthine feminine whose psyche spirals through vanity, liberty, escape, volition, plight, and ecstasy ad infinitum.