NASHVILLE, TENN.- Inka Essenhigh: Between Worlds, on view in the Frist Center for the Visual Arts’ Gordon Contemporary Artists Project Gallery from May 27 to October 9, 2016, features paintings and prints created over the past decade that connect dreamlike visions steeped in mysticism with allusions to twenty-first-century reality. Evoking a wide range of folklore and allegorical traditions as well as surrealist approaches to tapping into the unconscious, Essenhigh’s work both delights and challenges viewers’ understanding of how nature and humanity, as well as time and distance, are entwined.

Essenhigh was included in the Frist Center’s 2012 presentation of Fairy Tales, Monsters, and the Genetic Imagination, which featured contemporary artists who invent humanlike, animal, or hybrid creatures to symbolize life’s mysteries, desires, and fears. Addressing the recurring sense of duality in Between Worlds, Chief Curator Mark Scala notes, “In these paintings, boundaries are melted: interior becomes exterior; solid becomes fluid; the sensual overlaps with the absurd; plant becomes human; clarity and mystery coexist.”

Woodland gods of classical antiquity, such as Pan and Diana, are present in some paintings; in others, witches, tree spirits, water nymphs, and elves hearken back to Anglo-Saxon, Teutonic, or Norse folk traditions. “These mythical beings appear along with quirky phantasms of her own devising,” says Scala. “All these characters are bound to landscapes that are redolent of animism and metamorphosis: rocks, trees, water, and even pavement pulse with energy.”

Essenhigh’s works have a stylistic kinship with fantastic literary illustrations, from late nineteenth-century fairy and goblin drawings by Arthur Rackham to twentieth-century masterpieces by Walt Disney such as Fantasia and Snow White. Yet beneath the whimsical flourishes and the lush, warm color palette of her painted environments are powerful psychological undercurrents that echo the work of painters such as El Greco, Thomas Hart Benton, and Salvador Dali. “These predecessors anticipated her own imagery, which seems at once coherent and inexplicable,” says Scala. “Essenhigh’s narratives are burned onto the canvas like the most decisive moment of a dream, which may remain in our memory long after we wake.”

Moreover, the body of work in this exhibition reflects her time spent between lower Manhattan—where Essenhigh lives for most of the year—and a family home in rural Maine.

The anxiety triggered by inner-city living that is present in the paintings In Bed (2005), Spring Bar Scene (2008), and City Street (2013) contrasts with the tranquility of Essenhigh’s works set in the countryside. She finds inspiration in the beauty of nature and power of the seasons, and the treatment of the forest as a sentient organism pervades a group of works that include Green Goddess II (2009) and the triptych Summer Landscape (2013), which show wood spirits floating and prancing through field and forest, blissfully unaware of human existence. The Woodsman (2012) brings humanity and an accompanying sense of disruption into the picture. It shows a man with a chainsaw near a freshly cut tree, from which emerges a glowing tree spirit. The viewer is left to question whether the spirit is happily escaping its shell or intending to retaliate.

“We may consider her paintings in relation to our memories, cultural traditions, and beliefs,” says Scala. “Or, entranced by their beauty and sense of wonder, we might simply return to a time in our own lives when sensations were allowed to stir the inner world without reason or explanation.”

Born in 1969, Inka Essenhigh earned her BFA from Columbus College of Art and Design in Ohio, and her MFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York. Her paintings have been exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Miami, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Royal Academy of Arts in London. Her works are in the collections of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, the Denver Art Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Seattle Art Museum, Tate Modern, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.