Talissa Mehringer

Evil Intestine
Spray Paint on Fabric
84,1 x 118,9 cm
framed

Talissa Mehringer

Talissa Mehringer’s “Evil Intestine” manifests as a vivid spray paint on fabric creation, resonating with the primal and subconscious. Her work is deeply rooted in her multicultural upbringing and the rich tapestry of cultural experiences she absorbed through her travels. The artwork draws from the raw aesthetics of urban decay and the visceral energy of street art, encapsulating a visual lexicon that speaks to the shared human experience of darker emotions and the surreal landscapes of our dreams. Mehringer’s approach to art is an exploration of the metaphysical, channeling the collective unconscious into tangible forms that confront and engage the viewer.

We are living in a time when art has to be packaged, labeled, and presented to the world in neatly classifiable, palatable, and easily consumable parts, serving more and more as entertainment as opposed to provoking or encouraging thoughts to be braved longer than the 5 seconds it takes to ‘scroll past’.

As an artist whose works exist between the cracks of categorical structures, rejection has become a familiar friend. My work, for instance, has often been described as “too creepy,” but it is, on the other hand, not “creepy enough” to be considered horror. The darker, sometimes grotesque, street art characters I paint are not necessarily welcome additions to graffiti festivals whose organizers have spent time and money providing invited artists with walls in public spaces intended to beautify cities and their neighborhoods.
My non-narrative-driven film work toes the line between surrealism, animation, and experimental, but is neither any of these completely nor enough of each to fit into themed festival programming.

krautART ARTspace’s call for art to be exhibited in its own contemporary Salon de Refusées spoke to me immensely as a creative who is disillusioned by the commercialization and productization of art in today’s digital age.

krautArt is providing a platform for an interchange of ideas, experiments, and encounters that would perhaps otherwise have been confined to solitary studio corners or the depths of the ‘un-hashtag-able’ internet ocean.

I have worked and participated in many different fields in a technical as well as creative capacity, including film, the graffiti scene, and now audio, which are still very much male-dominated areas. Although representation and some opportunities are slowly becoming more accessible to women, it goes without saying that more inclusive exhibition opportunities are hugely important in providing us with the necessary stepping stones to advance creatively and gain future opportunities.

So many women artists throughout history have been condemned to dwell in the shadows of their male counterparts, and nothing will change until the normalization of women as equals in the collective psyche takes permanent hold.

– Talissa Mehringer