Sean Micka

Help. My beautiful freind Jesse Durost and his amazing family are in trouble. Please consider donating to the Gofundme link in my bio. They can’t work, and have a bright and brilliant son to look after. This is an emergency. Please share this. And donate, donate, donate. Jesse needs medical treatment to help him treat a very recent and serious cancer diagnosis. Here we are at the very top of the Chrysler building on job. I’ve known Jesse for well over ten years and he’s been my good friend and colleague. I love him immensely. Immeasurably. I wouldn’t be when I am if it weren’t for him. I can’t begin to stress how much it would mean for me for you to take a moment and share this. Please, from the bottom in my heart, help ❤️ @chandrabocci @jesse_durost

I said yes. 💍

Sabina (Destruction as the Cause of Coming Into Being) Oil on canvas, 14” x 11”, each, 2025 In psychoanalysis, resistance is the unconscious opposition to therapeutic progress, which Freud later linked to the "death drive" (Thanatos)—an innate, destructive urge toward repetition, inertia, and return to an inorganic state. Resistance manifests as the patient's refusal to change, often through the repetition compulsion, which works against the life-affirming libidinal drives. Sabina Spielrein (1885–1942) was a pioneering Russian-Jewish psychoanalyst, the first patient of Carl Jung, and a key, often overlooked figure in early psychoanalytic theory who introduced the concept of the death drive to Freud (destruction in the service of creation). She was murdered by an SS death squad in Rostov-on-Don in 1942. ------ Ancillary Figures is an ongoing series of portraits dedicated to women who participated in underground resistance movements across Europe during the Second World War, and it’s after effects. Many of these women served as couriers, saboteurs, organizers, partisans and rescuers. Roles that were often overlooked, minimized, or erased in official historical narratives. Some were arrested, tried and executed; others survived but remained marginal to the historical record: A life of self-erasure was a means to stay alive, and to remain invisible was one way to insure safety. The project seeks to return attention to these lives by reconstructing their presence through painting. The title Ancillary Figures refers to the ways these women have often been treated in historical narratives: as supporting characters in stories centered on male actors or national mythologies. By isolating and enlarging their images through painting, the series reverses that hierarchy. Figures once relegated to the margins become the central subject.

I’m very pleased to be showing three, recent paintings by Sean Micka. There is an ethical model implicit in reparation: not to “fix” the past by smoothing it, but to witness, to document, and to demand accountability. Micka’s paintings - material, slow, layered with gestures of erasure and repair - do exactly this. They are antidotes to the instant, forgetful pulse of the newsfeed. They create friction: a viewer must stop, reconcile, and carry something forward. They run counter to the destruction of history. Micka’s three works, “Rescued Manuscript”, “Marianne” and “Freddie”, circle around a central concern in his practice: portraits of women engaged in acts of resistance alongside the recovery of evidence and/or artifacts threatened by historical erasure. Micka’s work will be online through April 18th. For more information please visit the website. The link is in bio. @seanmicka #seanmicka #portraitsofwomen #resistence

02.05.26. Whistles, Warnings, and The Whistleblowers: Warnings are among the oldest social technologies. Long before formal law, societies relied on signals: shouts, bells, flags, sirens, whistles, smoke. Signals sent out to mark danger and mobilize collective response. A warning is not neutral information; it is an interruption. It breaks the flow of normal life to insist that something is wrong. The whistle condenses this logic. Small, portable, and loud, it is designed to cut through distance and denial. It calls attention to harm in progress or harm being concealed. The whistle does not resolve a crisis; it exposes it. It transfers responsibility outward, demanding witnesses. Whistleblowing operates on the same principle. It is an act of disclosure performed when institutions meant to protect instead conceal. Whistleblowers do not reveal what is unknown; they make public what has been systematically ignored, suppressed, or normalized. The risk they face (retaliation, disbelief, legal punishment, exile) reveals how power protects itself through silence. Recent history shows how warnings accumulate long before accountability arrives. Survivors speak. Evidence circulates. Records exist. Yet action is delayed because certain actors assume immunity (legal, political, social). Warnings are treated as noise until they can no longer be contained. This pattern is not accidental. Power depends on managing attention: deciding which alarms are heard and which are dismissed. The failure is not the absence of warnings, but the refusal to respond to them. When institutions monopolize force while resisting accountability, warning systems become last resorts rather than safeguards. A whistle is a call for help, but also a call to action. It asserts that harm is not private, not isolated, and not inevitable. Its force does not come from authority, but from numbers. Number from collective recognition. Power by force is finite, it exhausts. Power by exposure multiplies. Resistance is a multiplicity. ------- "• 233 FOUR SILVER WHISTLES" Medium: oil on canvas Dimensions: 91.44 cm x 91.44 cm (36” x 36”) Date of creation: May, 2016

EXTREME RISK PROTECTION ORDERS 1. Red flags mark the moment when violence is no longer hypothetical but has not yet fully materialized. They function as early indicators—signals that allow institutions, individuals, and states to intervene before force is openly deployed. In contemporary society, the term circulates across legal, psychological, and political registers, revealing how violence is increasingly managed preemptively rather than addressed after the fact. 2. At the interpersonal level, red flags describe patterns of control and escalation that precede abuse: surveillance, isolation, jealousy framed as care, the gradual erosion of autonomy. These behaviors are rarely recognized as violence in themselves, yet they reliably signal its approach. The parallel with legal red-flag mechanisms is instructive. In both cases, violence is understood not as a sudden rupture but as a process—one that announces itself through repetition, atmosphere, and pressure long before it becomes visible or actionable. 3. Historically, states have followed the same logic. The incremental annexations and territorial expansions of the 1930s—most notably the Anschluss—were framed as administrative adjustments, protective measures, or expressions of popular will. Each step tested the limits of tolerance and resistance, advancing power without triggering immediate confrontation. By the time violence was unmistakable, it had already been normalized through legal, bureaucratic, and symbolic means. Emergency did not arrive suddenly; it was prolonged, staged, and managed. 4. This condition defines the present. We are living within a permanent state of crisis, a perma-crisis, where emergency is continuous rather than exceptional. Governance increasingly relies on prediction, surveillance, and risk mitigation, while cultural and political systems struggle to distinguish between prevention and control. The monopoly on violence is no longer exercised only through overt force but through anticipatory frameworks that authorize intervention in the name of safety, stability, and order. -------------- Red Flag 60"x48", oil on canvas, 2025. #redflag #extremeriskprotectionorders #anschluss

Excessive Unrest, Lot 198, A Superb Gold Openface Minute Repeating Tourbillon, [...] Sotheby's Important Timpeices [...] 48" x 100" Oil on canvas, 2025.

Elisabeth Oil on canvas, 20” x 16”, 2025 Ancillary Figures ----- Elisabeth portrays Elisabeth Bergner (1897–1986), an Austrian-born actress whose life bridged art, exile, and resistance. A celebrated performer in Berlin, Paris, and London, Bergner used her prominence and resources to help fellow artists and children escape Nazi Germany. From aiding Brecht and Berlau to smuggling reports of atrocities to foreign journalists, she transformed the stage into a site of defiance. During the war, she trained as an ambulance driver, gathered intelligence for the Allies, and narrowly escaped Gestapo capture in Paris. This portrait reflects Bergner’s doubleness: actor and operative, performer and witness.

THE TWILIGHT ZONE OF HISTORY: One of the tasks of painting is mourning. It is a way of grieving: people we have lost, worlds that have vanished, an age that has slipped into memory. The past flickers: disappearing, returning, changing shape. We forget in order to remember. Gerhard Richter once said that a photograph evokes horror, while a painting is something closer to grief. I keep thinking about this distinction. Grief is not instantaneous; it stretches over time. It lingers. That endurance is what painting makes possible: memory becoming matter again, held in a form that resists disappearance. It makes time visible. Eric Hobsbawm once described what he called the “twilight zone of history”: the strange condition in which the past mingles with the present, where lived experience blurs with recollection. As he grew older, he felt a deepening sense of loss for the historical events he had witnessed and written about—events that shaped the twentieth century and continued to imprint themselves on the future. His term also gestures toward the dawn of history: the threshold we occupy each day, knowing yesterday and today with certainty, but not yet knowing how tomorrow will unfold. As Bergson said: It is the space between memory and anticipation, between what has passed and what has not yet come to be. [continues below] 👇

ARTIFICIAL MARVELS In every age of speculation, the flower returns. The tulip—fragile, perishable, briefly radiant—has long served as the emblem of markets that outrun themselves. In the seventeenth century it signaled a mania so fierce that a single bulb could rival a house; in the early twenty-first, housing itself became the speculative bloom; today, the frenzy gathers around artificial intelligence, a technology vaporous enough to seduce investors who mistake possibility for inevitability. Each cycle echoes the last, only taller, thinner, and more brittle. David Harvey’s notion of fictitious capital hovers over these moments like a weather system: value detaching from matter, debt piling upon debt, prices drifting farther from the world that supposedly grounds them. The economy becomes a hall of mirrors. Something small—an interest-rate shift, a rumor, a glitch—touches the surface, and the whole structure trembles. The tulip still life, in this context, becomes more than a botanical study. The exploding bloom recalls a market at its threshold, brilliant and already breaking. Its petals flare like graphs at their peak. Its delicate form stands in for the fragility of systems built on abstractions. And the painted overlays—fractures, veils, interruptions—echo the opacity of financial instruments and the shadows in which speculation thrives. The art market, too, is caught in this rhythm. Galleries close, fortunes reshape, artworks circulate like currency—liquid, illiquid, hedged, leveraged—while meanings become secondary to price. Value becomes untethered from use, history, or symbolism, floating in a speculative ether. In this landscape, the tulip is more than a flower; it is a warning. It appears whenever a culture has confused beauty with investment, promise with profit, symbol with asset. It blooms most brightly just before the fall. #marketbubble #artificialintelligence

11.16.2025 Jesse Durost Memorial Ride. From Rosemary’s Playground to Flushing Meadows Corona Park to Kissena Corridor Park. @chandrabocci organized it all and led the way using a route from Jesse’s phone. We swore we saw him as an Ergot by the Fountains of the Planets. The cosmic circle of life, keeping an eye on us. In Kissena we found an accessible bank of water where we set adrift some pieces of bark with some of Jesse’s remains, flowers and notes written on dissolving paper, tucked into pinecones. I kept a few pinecones to keep the memory safe. It was a good five hour ride, 25 miles maybe more. Hit the Velladrome for few laps. Legs are toast. It’s all about the journey, not the destination. We miss you so much buddy @jesse_durost ❤️ #jessedurost