"Afterlife" © Risa Oshinsky 2025
The medium is the message.
― Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man
Before photography, before film, before AI, before the printing press, there were cave drawings and oral storytelling, painting and sculpture. 23-year-old Risa Oshinsky's three-dimensional ethereal Afterlife, resembles ancient artifacts. Hung from wires, it swings gently when the doors to the Dorsky Gallery open. And then its articulated parts settle and catch the light. What is this, I wondered, as I walked around it, mesmerized, and snapped a couple of photos with my iPhone, modern technology capturing something that felt primal. Up close, I deciphered bones. Were they human? I hoped not.
"I wanted to create a space for people to confront morbidity," Risa told me on the phone the other day. I caught her in California on vacation with her family before she heads back to New Paltz to finish her last term at SUNY. Afterlife is her BFA thesis project.
"I suffered from panic disorders when I was young. Somehow the horror genre in movies and books helped me cope. I worked in a Haunted House when I was in high school," she said.
Staged by professionals, Haunted Houses and Forests are an industry these days which says something about the fear level in our culture. School shootings, lockdown drills, pandemics, bullying—and that is a shortlist—are all amplified by instantaneous news scrolls on social media. Catastrophe, and the threat of catastrophe, hits young people hard.
Talking to her empathetic sculpture professor, Michael Asbill, about anxiety as fuel for making art, he suggested that Risa attempt a sculptural project using bones. She would be in good company: Henry Moore, Damien Hirst and Orozco, all used bones in their work, as does Professor Asbill himself.
"I meet all my students where they are," he says, " but I suppose you could say that Risa and I found each other."
He told her about a roadkill dump site at the top of a steep slope where carcasses are thrown by the police or roadworkers. Roadkill is a manifestation of humans encroaching on natural habitat; ours is not a thoughtful, shared environment and the dump is not a sacred burial site. Though it's legal to harvest meat and bones in New York State, not many can stomach the stench at the site or the vista of dead bodies.
It takes about two weeks for a carcass to decompose before the bones slide down towards the river. Risa collected a stash, soaked them in dish soap, scrubbed them with a toothbrush, bleached them with hydrogen peroxide, dried them, and sorted them into boxes, a painstaking process.
Not surprisingly, perhaps, she is a vegetarian. "I love animals. I'll stop to help a wounded animal on the side of the road," she told me. "Working with animal bones is calming, intimate and meditative." The shape of the work, its meaning, surfaces as she cleans, handles, and sorts the bones.
"Once you see the boundaries of your environment, they are no longer the boundaries of your environment," Marshall McLuhan once said. Risa has seen beyond the boundary of her own still young life. Embedded in her work is the admonition to take care of the environment and each other.