MELISSAHERRINGTON
MFA Exhibition
"I am alone here in my own mind.
There is no map
and there is no road.
It is one of a kind
just as yours is."
— Anne Sexton
ECHOES OF SIGHT
So with the lamps all put out, the moon sunk, and a thin rain drumming on the roof a down pouring of immense darkness began. Nothing, it seemed, could survive the flood, the profusion of darkness that, creeping in at keyholes and crevices, stole round window blinds and came into bedrooms. There was scarcely anything left of body or mind by which one could say, "This is he" or "This is she." Sometimes a hand was raised as if to clutch something or ward off something, or somebody groaned, or somebody laughed aloud as if sharing a joke with nothingness.
I want to tell you what it is that I think about while these pieces are being made. I am just a maker of paintings. I put pigment on the wooden support, in systematic layers to allow the paint to dry. I build this surface up and then take away part. I continue this process of building and subtractions, I think of night and its messengers and the silhouettes that linger. I think of that time before the sun breaks the horizon. The cut between the dark and the beauty of the sun. The moment that slips, the change in perception. This cut is relative to my work as an artist. I fuse images together in a random juxtaposition, a contemporary visual portmanteau. This imagery is inlayed and entombed. Contradicting languages of redundant painterly gestures interrupt the comprehensibility of the subtle figures and symbols. Looking from within, looking side to side, not knowing, a visual lack of cognation, the abject laws of perceptions- they twist. Systems of structures and strategies learning that the act of seeing takes place in time.
I want to tell you what it is that I think about while these pieces are being made, that boundary between the thin edge of being understood and being nonsense. It does not consist of meaningless gibberish but is rather its own system of signs which gain their meaning by constantly dramatizing their differences from signs in other systems. The inconsistency between the figure and its rhythmic interruptions, and the tension between the figure and its barely differentiated background, allow and disallow it from taking form.
A subversion of the not seeing.
Inversion of the inverted order. Boundary violation. Symbolic order. Color to create space as an interruption of seeing (a site of perception) verses site of reception.
I want to tell you what it is that I think about while these pieces are being made. I am just a maker of paintings. I put pigment on the wooden support, in systematic layers to allow the paint to dry. I build this surface up and then take away part. I continue this process of building and subtractions, I think of night and its messengers and the silhouettes that linger. I think of that time before the sun breaks the horizon. The cut between the dark and the beauty of the sun. The moment that slips, the change in perception. This cut is relative to my work as an artist. I fuse images together in a random juxtaposition, a contemporary visual portmanteau. This imagery is inlayed and entombed. Contradicting languages of redundant painterly gestures interrupt the comprehensibility of the subtle figures and symbols. Looking from within, looking side to side, not knowing, a visual lack of cognation, the abject laws of perceptions- they twist. Systems of structures and strategies learning that the act of seeing takes place in time.
I want to tell you what it is that I think about while these pieces are being made, that boundary between the thin edge of being understood and being nonsense. It does not consist of meaningless gibberish but is rather its own system of signs which gain their meaning by constantly dramatizing their differences from signs in other systems. The inconsistency between the figure and its rhythmic interruptions, and the tension between the figure and its barely differentiated background, allow and disallow it from taking form.
A subversion of the not seeing.
Inversion of the inverted order. Boundary violation. Symbolic order. Color to create space as an interruption of seeing (a site of perception) verses site of reception.
