*Artist, Inka Essenhigh: My name is Inka Essenhigh. I grew up in Columbus, Ohio, and I've lived in New York since about '91, when I came here for graduate school.
This is called Cheerleaders and Sky. And the medium is just fancy enamel paint. I’d start off with just a plain blue background, I was looking for a way to just get ideas going, and I'd say to myself, well, that's sky. So then I'd just start to doodle, and if I don't like it, I just sand it away. And I was just looking for interesting little forms, and peppy cheerleaders popped out.
When I start drawing, they always turn into people. The people just don't look real. They don't feel real, they're not real. So they're eternal plastic. Made of the future.
They're not jumping up. They are kind of falling. They're flying apart. But I actually never thought of my paintings as being violent. I always thought of them as being actually more funny. No one's in pain. Absolutely not. It's part of the whole plastic world.
They wear sportswear, and sportswear always went along with the whole plastic-y feeling of the whole painting. There's something kind of brand new about it, and kind of techno looking I liked the patent leather feeling. I liked that there was this sense of authenticity somewhere in the peculiarities of what was going on, but that the surface of it kind of was as pristine as a lot of just products being made. Everything is very smoothed out.
At that time, I really wanted to capture what I thought of as being super contemporary. My goal was to make work that looked like it could not have been made at any other time.