About the Collaboration  Long time friends, Shishko and Moseley met periodically before the pandemic to create art together as a way of looking at their individual practices through a different lens. Both shared a process-driven approach and an orientation towards vibrant, energetic work, so mingling their techniques was exciting.  During these improvisational art sessions, they each initiated work from shared materials, then switched midway through to continue working into the other’s piece. Shishko’s masses of discarded clothing, acquired from acquaintances, soon became a counterpoint to stacks of unresolved screenprints and cyanotypes contributed from Moseley’s studio. Cutting both bodies of material into strips and weaving through and around other found objects, the two identified an interesting tension between Shishko’s focus on our hollow throw-away culture and Moseley’s attention to the hallowed nature of treasured objects.  A new collaboration was born. 

This dynamic is embodied most fully in their large installation, The Two-Headed Dragoness. This monumental assemblage represents the tension of opposing forces people attach to objects: objects that look forward, imagining the future versus objects that conjure the past, memorializing a treasured time, place or person.  The Dragoness is made from a range of work created by each of the artists before and during their collaborative process.  As they amassed this new body of work they realized that when combined and manipulated, the art as a whole became far more potent than the sum of its individual parts. Through the process, their understanding of the broader concepts and implications of their work was deepened and expanded.