Buffalo, NY – Tomorrow the Albright-Knox Art Gallery will open a new exhibition entitled Shark Girl: Never Quite There. The exhibition explores artist Casey Riordan Millard’s (American, born 1973) many depictions of Buffalo’s beloved Shark Girl, 2013, including works on paper, paintings, sculptures, and installations. The exhibition will remain on view until Sunday, October 1, 2017.

In the three short years since Millard’s iconic Shark Girl arrived in Western New York and took up residence at Canalside, the sculpture has been so widely shared and experienced that it is now one of Buffalo’s best-known citizens. However, it is perhaps less known that Shark Girl has served as one of Millard’s principal artistic motifs for more than a decade. Ranging from some of her earliest representations of her signature character to newly imagined diorama-style installations, this exhibition presents the many facets of Shark Girl’s eccentric, flawed, and altogether extraordinary personality. 

Millard’s image of the half-shark half-girl originated in the early 2000s as a response to internalized anxiety and existential foreboding, a sense that she was not in control of her life. Shortly after getting married, the reality of the phrase “until death do us part” suddenly resonated, crippling her with terror. She began to experience profound and debilitating panic attacks triggered by the notion that her husband was going to die suddenly and unexpectedly. This reflection on the meaning and power of her marital love led to a conceptual crisis for the artist.

When she attempted to understand her anxieties, the closest parallel Millard could draw was to her irrational childhood fear of sharks. Millard explained that as a young girl, “I would be swimming and then all of the sudden I would feel like a shark was going to attack me and I would just, in a panic, jump out of the swimming pool, breathing heavily and freaking out. I would never tell anybody because I was so embarrassed.” Millard recognized that her newfound fears over her husband’s death were similarly illogical, yet she could not shake them.

She turned to her artistic practice as a form of therapy. Beginning with crude sketches of shark-infested pools and bathtubs, Millard’s efforts to exorcize her fears by visually representing her struggles led her to create the whimsical yet improbable chimera of a shark-girl. For Millard, Shark Girl is exactly what she appears to be: a little girl, delicate and innocent, topped with an absurd shark head. As Millard embraced three-dimensional mixed-media production in addition to her drawing and painting and increased the workload in her studio, she found that she fretted less and less.

Shark Girl: Never Quite There will allow Buffalonians the opportunity to explore this beloved character like never before. The exhibition is located in the museum’s Clifton Hall Link, and is organized by Curator of Public Art Aaron Ott. This exhibition is supported by The Seymour H. Knox Foundation.

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