Melissa Herrington

OPEN STUDIOS

Registration:

10:30 am

Westminster School, 1010 Abbot Kinney Blvd., Venice, CA 90291

Tickets: $50 per person (children under 12 free), includes an all-day pass to the following activities, as well as a Venice Art Walk & Auctions Catalog and Event Guide. All advance ticket buyers receive a $15 discount to the Dwell on Design Exhibition, June 27-28, 2009.

www.venicefamilyclinic.org

All Proceeds Benefit Venice Family Clinic
Venice Family Clinic’s mission is to provide free, quality health care to people in need. Founded in 1970, the Clinic is the largest free clinic in the country. Nearly 1,500 volunteers – including almost 500 physicians and 700 Venice Art Walk volunteers – enable the Clinic to provide services to over 23,500 low-income and uninsured people in need through eight locations in Venice, Santa Monica, Mar Vista and Culver City.

Artists’ Studio Tours and Special Exhibits
More than you could dream of covering in one day – 60 private artists’ studios, homes and special exhibits! Begin at Westminster School. Free shuttle buses run continuously throughout the day and will be there to help you cover more ground and see more art. (Click here for a list of participating artists.) 11:30 am to 4:30 pm

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.