Mythic Play Beast XLVI, 2002

Monotype Pastel, 21 1/2" x 17 1/4"

   Mythic Play Beast Series

Isham seems to be showing us some kind of Arcadia that has not experienced the catastrophe of misunderstanding between the human and animal worlds, as described by Russian philosopher and poet Velemir Khlenbnikov: "Man took the surface of the earth's sphere away from the wise community of beasts and plants and he became lonely: he had no one with whom to play tag or blind-man's bluff."

 For Isham, too, the human and animal worlds are one, and it is this wise community of beasts, humans, birds, reptiles and plants - a community not mediated by cultural codes- that inhabits her canvases. In our attempts to come closer to myth, we adjust our 'optics', our ways of seeing using mediating cultural lenses.

 - Alexander Borovsky

 Professor /  Curator at Russian State Museum