Melissa Herrington

A desire, an echo, a sound; she could drape in color, see it in form, hear it in music, but not in words; no, never in words.

OPENING RECEPTION

February 9, 2008  6-9pm 

Otis College of Art and Design, Bolsky Gallery

9045 Lincoln Boulevard

Los Angeles, California 90045 

She makes all of her life and work a passage, a becoming, all kinds of becomings. She stands before her mirror, the glass gone “all soft like gauze,” and wonders if she can push her way through to the other side.  Reaching for a temporary moment that serves as a portal to another world. Reflected and refracted is her reversed image and behind her lies the same room she is standing in but not.  Realities, connected to the real by some means, but distinctly separate.  The simulacra serves as a mirror to the real, but in the process of reflection, certain aspects of the real are altered.  As Baudrillard wrote, “the shadow, the mirror image, haunts the subject like his other, which makes it so that the subject is simultaneously itself and never resembles itself again.”

My paintings come from a place where most of the lights have flickered.  The heavy darkness of the paintings makes me blink and squint. I want to peer into their light- devouring voids, trying to make out the telltale surroundings for traces of gestures, alight source? Trying to figure out where the perspective hollowed-out shapes exist. I suppose it is more phantom than flesh that is within these dense layers of acrylic paint.  My eyes have become accustomed to viewing, a delicate task of refocusing, of starting to see absence as well as presence, to recognizing the slight contrast of a trace. Traces that no longer can be given a name. Do we make sense of the trace as a sign of something no longer and therefore a mark of absence? Marking a space between impression and imprint, a palimpsest.