Masha Sheinina — CalArts Post Grad Show Y25

Masha Sheinina

(Art MFA 25)
IG: @kakashaceramics

Chasing Love and Affection; Associated Press; Pissing Dick-Snake; A Merman of Integrity; Which One are You?, all static sculptures. May God Grant Me the Serenity, a kinetic sculpture accompanied by a poem, by Zack England, 2025

Masha Sheinina’s ceramic sculptures explore the feminine grotesque through chimeric creatures that embody agency and its violation — by one’s own self, by intimate partners, and by government power. Working with ceramic sculpture after a decade teaching middle school biology, Sheinina brings mechanomic understanding of bodies to fantastical reimaginings of corporeal form. Her chimeras are not what they are supposed to be and have no desire to conform.

The chimera is a recurring vehicle for questioning hegemonic power, as creatures historically represented as female monsters (harpies and furies, sphinxes and sirens) have embodied contradictions of desirability and disgust. This new presentation suggests a repressed set of emotions and affects on the brink of explosion: transmuted and righteous fury, rage, and chaos. Violent norms require a violent refusal. Sheinina creates an ecosystem of chimeric resistance where monstrous repulsion and delight coexist, where helplessness and threat, supine vulnerability and looming danger occupy the same space. Demons dance among the flames; they are joined by hybrid forms, insects, mythological beings in a menagerie. Joining the carnival are a merman cumming into its own mouth, a supine reverse merman, helpless and unable to rise, a threatening centipede, and a screaming centaur. The installation addresses the sense of helplessness we experience when those we are close to perpetrate intimate violations against us. Monstrous transformation becomes a site of agency rather than loss. Refusing normative form becomes refusal of normative power.

PROXY CHIMERA ORACLE

CalArts 2025