Nika McKagen

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︎︎︎ info
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Nika McKagen

︎︎︎ index
︎︎︎ info
︎︎︎ephemera

Hybrid, 16x20" silver gelatin print void expert, 16x20" silver gelatin print Cerberus Guarding the Last-known Entrance, 16x20" silver gelatin print Nekyia, 24x20" silver gelatin print Poor Lamb: the World-incoming, 9x12" silver gelatin print, wood, rock, milk paint Salvation (Cambria), 18x22" silver gelatin prints Rapture, 20x24" silver gelatin print lithotroph, 9x12" silver gelatin print Human-like Animal Addresses the Issue of Remembering, 20x24" silver gelatin print shell #2, 6x7cm negative Orpheus + Eurydice (Orpheus’s alternate vision), 20x24" silver gelatin print one cell staggers, 2.5x5" silver gelatin print, wood, milk paint one cell staggers, 2.5x5" silver gelatin print, wood, milk paint Chastity (Austin), 16x20" silver gelatin collage How he drove the cattle to Mycenae, 16x20" silver gelatin print Geryon's sacrifice, 8x10" silver gelatin print and in eyes no sight (sappho), 6x7cm film negative Twin Tree (things I learned), 6x7cm infrared film negative
The Grotto
2024-25

The Grotto delves into Greek mythos, studying various katabases (descents into the underworld) in order to explore how the ascent from the underworld can contort and change a body in the contemporary domestic realm. This project alludes to artificial grottos that are made as places focused around devotion and plasticity. Everything follows us home.

The photographs are printed on expired silver gelatin paper from the US and the USSR, my two native cultures. Life-casted plaster sculptures, sometimes finished with a silver nitrate “skin” become shells that are shed after moments of bigness. This series explores creatures that don’t fully exist in the natural or supernatural worlds: possessed bodies that are affected by the madness of the grotto and inhabited by some kind of magic that only exists between worlds.