ABOUT LENA

Lena Miskulin is a New York City based artist who explores the ways in which we understand our own humanity by delving into the physicality, emotion, and spirituality of our relationships with one another and with our environment. We are brought into the intimate internal worlds of her subjects (both person and place) who disentangle, in their moments of reflection, collected memory and time to understand their own development and growth. She illustrates how memory functions fluidly as an unfolding singularity of packaged moments and fractals of sensation, scent, sound, color, and imagery, which compose our very identities and spiritual cores. 

Through oil painting and mixed media, and more abstractly through sculpture and photography, she captures a universal, though prominently female, experience of holistically processing love, time, and momentary presence as we strive towards connecting more deeply with people and place, yet paradoxically crave isolation and individual fulfillment. This contradiction shapes her view on the passage of time and her sense of mono no aware for the beauty in ephemerality, a motif present throughout her body of work.

She sees the environment as a direct reflection and incarnation of human behavior and essence, as well as a symbiotic participant in the cooperative of our living world. There is a call in her work to consider how we view ourselves as individuals in relation to the natural world. Often collaborating with plant or animal life and biomaterials in her painting and sculptures, she aims to emphasize the importance of coexistence both between people, and with nature. She approaches sustainability as a bottom-up effort, viewing the world outside the body as an extension of all that can exist within- thus becoming an act of self and familial preservation. Just as we are composed from the same elements, she views our world as the living macrocosm of all internal rhythm, sensation, and meaning.

In 2018 she was featured in RE:Artiste’s International Group Exhibition, Environmental Food Chain, a multidisciplinary exploration of human influences from and on nature, and the effects of cultivation and consumption on the world and organisms that inhabit it. 

In a world where genuine reflection and clarity have become scarce, Lena encourages her audience to truly become aware of their emotional and physical presences, growing more mindful as individuals, in our relationships, and in our engagement with the natural world. As we look for simplicity and human integrity in our rapidly evolving world, we must find it first within our own hearts, minds, and spirits.