MELISSA SHIMKOVITZ AKA MILITIA AKA SHIM CO

by Renata Espinosa

Before I even meet Melissa Shimkovitz, I’m not exactly sure what to call her. She seems to be an elusive figure - “spirit” is perhaps a better word for it, now that I have actually met her - who goes by many names. “Militia” is one, “Shim-co” is how I hear someone else refer to her, and it’s also the name that I see on a web site of her professional work, her online portfolio. That’s the business Melissa, perhaps. Then there’s “Melish” - a diminutive of “Militia/Melissa,” I assume, or maybe she’s simply “m” if you want to get really familiar. Her e-mail ID reads “macho mel.”

Melissa is friends with Bianca and Sierra Casady of CocoRosie, and with Bianca she formed Voodoo-EROS in 2004, a multifaceted entity that exists, for the moment, primarily as a record label for musicians like Quinn Walker, Diane Cluck and Sierra Casady and Matteah Baim’s band Metallic Falcons. “We had this idea for a record label, so we put a label on a box of tapes, and it became a record label,” she says. But Voodoo-EROS is more than just a label. It’s also a self-described “archival cannon; more of an art collection, or a collection of plastic bags or a gay-art collector than an actual art collective” meaning that they put out an anthology of “lost” songs entitled “The Enlightened Family” in 2004, with nuggets from Devendra Banhart, for example, another member of the inner circle; they’ve also curated art shows and been shopkeepers of the Museum of Nice Items, a roving pop-up shop: “It’s a nomadic store. Most recently seen in Rotterdam. It comes around just when you need it.”

Melissa is the computer guru of Voodoo-EROS, the go-to for web site design, Flickr page uploading, cover art designing and Flash animating, but that’s just because she’s the only one who really knows how to use a computer, she says, and because she likes to figure out that kind of stuff. (Plus, she says, she doesn’t sleep much and needed something to do while she wasn’t sleeping.) She’s also a playwright - she has a theater company in Kansas, where she lived right before she moved to New York - and in recent years, she’s taken up drawing and finds herself curating various art shows, though she wouldn’t call herself a curator per se: “I think things curate themselves. I think if you just sit back and let the cosmos send people to you, it will become clearer what needs to happen. I think I am a curator, I think I create communities, real and fictional. I think I curate a really good after-hours, right here.”

She’s curated tea-time for me when I arrive on her door step in south Williamsburg, an area of Brooklyn populated by Puerto Ricans, Hasidic Jews and various artist/musician/creative types. I’m still calling her “Melissa” in my mind, because it seems like the formal journalistic thing to do even though I am pretty sure she’d prefer to be called anything but that. There’s no buzzer, like many apartments in the area, so I call her when I arrive and she greets me at the door. It’s a balmy spring day in New York punctuated by small bursts of rain showers, but it’s warm, so cutoff shorts are in order, which is what she’s wearing that day. We walk up a couple of flights of stairs into her cozy corner apartment, which is flooded with light at this hour, the late afternoon. The walls are painted a shade of teal blue and there is a sage bundle on a side table next to a futon chair covered with an Mexican-style wool blanket. A small kitchen adjoins the living room where she has a table set up for screen printing and above that, one of her larger, obsessively rendered drawings of a fantastical-looking figure composed of hundreds of tiny little circles and other marks in black ink.

Almost immediately, she offers me coffee (prior to our meeting, I’d mentioned that I like coffee) but apologizes for not having any food to offer me just as I’m regretting not having brought over cookies like I’d planned. There’s something very familiar about these formalities and the politeness, and eventually we figure out that we both have a connection to New Mexico, the “Land of Enchantment.” It’s the kind of place that makes a lasting impression however much time you’ve spent there. My family is from there, and Melissa tells me that her family is, too - her spiritual extended family, that is - and she’s gone there every year since she moved to New York in 2000. She’s particularly excited, though, about her plans for her upcoming summer trip because she’s just recently acquired a small house off the Rio Grande in the northern part of New Mexico, “forty miles off the grid, with no telecommunications,” she says. She’ll go there to work on her art - drawings, videos, plays - for shows in Brooklyn and Paris at the end of the year, namely because if she stays in New York, she tells me, she’ll end up starting even more new projects.

Which brings us to the reason she goes by so many different names.

“Every name you use is for yourself, but yourself has about ten different faces, right, so all the faces have a name,” she says as she hands me my coffee and I sit down on the blanket-covered futon. Melissa sits in the corner on a small stool stationed at her computer desk where a large iMac is placed. Next to that, there is a small bookshelf on one side, and on the other a smaller table with a laptop.

“If I’m doing one thing, like spell checking, I’ll prefer to be referred to as Melissa. Melissa’s a spell checker. But if I’m in Europe doing that, then probably Militia. ‘Melissa’ means honeybee in Greek - I was living in Greece for a little while - and that became unpalatable. It’s like having a stripper name.”

Melissa - let’s call her Militia now, because it was time she spent on the road with CocoRosie in Europe that led to her current, main pursuit - drawing. In 2006, while she was touring with them, she wound up in the hospital for three weeks. “I had nothing to do so someone gave me a pad of paper and a couple of pens, and I just started drawing.”

“I think I was experiencing writer’s block,” she continues. “Basically I just started drawing my writing, or writing my drawings.”

Eventually, she spent all her time drawing and found herself wanting to really explore the boundaries of drawing, the way she saw photographers doing with their craft. “I was like, I want to do experimental drawing.” She rattles off a list of activities she considers to be “experimental drawing”: Purposeful spitting onto the ground. Skywriters. Crop circles. “The aliens are experimental drawers, for sure.”

Militia decided to start a drawings digest called “Mental Fax” to see what far-out place you can take the definition of a drawing.

“When you’re in Chicago when it’s so cold, if you speak and move the right way you can spell your name. That counts as a drawing. If you send me a dead raccoon in a box and say, ‘Here’s my drawing,’ I’m gonna be like, ‘That’s some next-level shit!’ And I’m gonna scan it. Is that weird?”

She describes a recent show she saw at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

“There was this group of Swedish girls [Front Design] who had this project where they would draw in space, meanwhile, the pen they were using was attached to a motion sensor and it was documenting everything. From there, it would send a computerized report to this special quick-mold plastic ionizing bath. So they would draw a chair, in the air, and then minutes later, this white plastic mold would get pushed up from this big bath of plastic. And then there it was. Their drawing was a chair.”

So what has she found so far?

“Stuff from a four-year-old in France named Joshua is amongst the greatest drawings I’ve received.”

Militia’s a performer as well (She met Bianca, actually, on the set of a play. Bianca was the costume designer), and throughout our interview she’ll change her voice as she tells different stories. Now, her voice takes on a mock tone of seriousness, like a museum curator. “I had seen his work before, so I actually approached him and I asked if he would come up with a few selections for me. He did, and his mother emailed them for him because he’s not tall enough to use the computer in the house.”

“I thought maybe if I started this new magazine I could cast a larger net and ask people to just send me drawings, everybody from everywhere,” Militia explains. “It keeps seeming like a good idea to start another project that somehow supports other people. Maybe it’s that Midwestern ‘Aw, shucks’ mentality but I never have a sense of self-entitlement, I guess.”

Militia describes her plans for publishing Mental Fax - at first, it will exist as a blog where she publishes drawings as she receives them. Eventually it will be a printed book, she thinks, and a Flash-animated book on a web site.

“It’s just going to be one drawing on a page, no other words,” says Militia about the plans for the print edition. “I want Mental Fax to be a big phonebook of drawings that you could just open up to anything at any time and think, ‘Oh, I’ve never seen anything like that before.’”

Still, Militia worries about wanting to have a tactile, hold-it-in-your hand print version of Mental Fax versus having it exist only on the web, where she feels it’s not only more accessible, but there’s also less of of a carbon footprint.

“Having a big paper magazine - digest - even if it’s really lightweight, so much goes into shipping,” she explains. “It just gets to be too much on my conscience.”

“I have distribution for it, but there’s just one thing that holds me back, and that’s the ecological impact. I just put everything I have down on a little piece of land on the Rio Grande in New Mexico because I’m so scared of what’s going to happen in the world. I’m listening to NPR about Burma all day. You just want to check out, but I can’t check out and be a part of the problem. You have to either check out or not be a part of the problem.”

For now, though, Militia and Bianca haven’t checked out of the world - if anything, they’ve done quite the opposite by spreading the Voodoo-EROS family to the far corners of the globe, be it the high desert of New Mexico, a gallery in the 18th arrondissement of Paris or a Museum of Nice Items in Rotterdam, they’re a band of roving gypsies “introducing weirdness” to teenagers across the globe.

So is there a point or a place where the Voodoo-EROS family comes together, or calls home?

“There’s totally a geographic center,” muses Militia, “but it doesn’t exist in any sort of tangible place or time. There’s a place that we all meet somewhere on the astral plane and we high five each other there all the time. I never feel really far from anybody, but we’re very rarely all in the same place. I always know where everybody is. Even when I don’t know where they’re at, I know where they are. If that makes any sense.”

“And there’s always iChat,” she laughs.

“Then there’s mentally faxing each other, which is where it all comes from. When you think about drawing, how caveman is a drawing? It’s putting what we’re thinking in our mind out where other people can see it.”