MIKE SISKA
Mixed Media on paper / 12 x 18 inches
Mixed Media on paper / 12 x 18 inches
Mixed Media on paper / 24 x 18 inches / Private Collection
Mixed Media on paper / 12 x 18 inches
Siska did not grow up with art. He came to it in his mid-twenties, newly arrived in Atlanta, self-taught, and searching, the kind of beginning that leaves its mark on everything that follows. What drew him in were artists who seemed to operate outside the expected: the eccentric visionary intensity of Howard Finster, R.A. Miller, and Mose Tolliver, and the electrifying collision of word, image, and urgency in Jean-Michel Basquiat. From there, a sustained private education exploring Motherwell, Tapies, Twombly, Mitchell, gave shape to an instinct he is still learning to trust.
That instinct has always moved toward the incomplete, the accumulative, the found. His paintings are built from texture and collage, fragments of poetry and scraps of material, the layered visual language of city life, construction hoardings, graffiti, architecture glimpsed from a moving car. The city is less a subject than a constant source: restless and generative, always offering something to work with. Accidents are not corrected; they are followed.
Over time the practice has grown to include wood and metal sculpture, but the underlying impulse hasn't changed. The ancient Greek word poiesis (from which "poetry" descends) simply means making.
For Siska, that is enough of a definition. Each work is an attempt at a small poem: not to illustrate a feeling, but to create the conditions in which one might unexpectedly arrive.