MELISSAHERRINGTON

little girls in pretty boxes

"Twice I have so simply declared myself,
have possessed the enemy, eaten the enemy,
have taken on his craft, his magic."
— Anne Sexton

The Pathos of Women
by michelle wiener

Shadows rendered in violent gashes. Suffocated surfaces and barren trees. Slits, stitches and barriers that remain highly composed, or should I say unfailingly poised. One enters the gallery only to become cocooned in tragic beauty.

The title of this exhibition suggests Melissa Herrington investigates the theme of maturation in her new body of work. However, I would argue that Herrington is examining the work of the body, specifically the female form, metaphorically and literally. Through the vehicles of Western myth and literary works from nineteenth century female writers, Herrington explores Woman in relationship to Plato’s cave and domestic interiors.

I would consider Herrington to be a lyrical painter, in that she has built a personal visual language throughout her career as an artist. Even the titles of the paintings, which are grouped together in clusters, take on poet Tristan Tzara’s cut up method for creating Dadaist poetry. The paintings and the titles are fragments without one another, only to form a complete thought when united. This could be a claim or position Herrington has for building a female community.
The power in numbers or constructing a series is not a new concept for Herrington, for her installation Los Angeles County Project (2007) not only spoke directly to the community of Los Angeles, but also would not have had the same impact had it not been a room filled with over two hundred drawings.

Yes, I could compare the titles to the nonsensical absurdity of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, especially since there is a reference to Carroll’s poem Jabberwocky in one of Herrington’s titles, but I do not believe that she is speaking from a (seemingly) juvenile point of view. Rather, I would say that she is reflecting from a more mature and critical standpoint, commenting on issues such as the fiction of femininity and the power that it still may or may not hold.
Containment is not only embedded in the exhibition title, but a common thread in the work. The paintings themselves are on panels with deep cradles. Not only does this aspect further the discussion of the paintings as rarefied art objects, but the actual objectification of the subjects rendered in them. The deep cradle also pushes the illusion or illustration of the box, for these female representations are literally inside these panel boxes.

The womb itself is the ultimate box. It is the vessel that is carried by and what a woman was once cradled in. If biology is destiny as philosopher Simone de Beauvoir suggests in the first chapter of The Second Sex, then woman is trapped by her nature, contained by her own container of life. We could, therefore, compare women to the prisoners of nature in Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. Herrington’s motif of silhouettes could allude to these shadows. With no subjects that seem to cast the shadow-like figures, I would like to propose that the shadows or silhouettes represent the authority of a patriarchal society.

Freud as well wrote extensively on symbolic meaning of the cave, comparing it to the womb, the female space, and the house of earth. Herrington speaks to this by relating it to the female realm, or domesticity in her piece a flashing light, a fleeting shade, binning, end and middle. The slight contrast of a trace. I & II (Figure 1). The diptych is a visual simile that symbolizes the cave, house and womb. One panel is of a veiled darkness with the lace pattern smothering the entire surface as if it is veiling the viewers as they peer into the cavernous space.

Figure 1. Melissa Herrington, a flashing light, a fleeting shade, binning, end and middle. The slight contrast of a trace. I ,II
Mixed Media on Angled Panel, 48” x 48”, 2009
Courtesy of the Artist and Soren Christensen Gallery

Juxtaposed to this highly mannered emptiness is a panel lighter in value to it would appear oppositional in subject and form. Upon further examination, the painting contains a rendering of a female with a rabbit head inside a space that appears to be domestic, for the rectangles in perspective have me infer that they could be windows.
Yes, women are compared to houses, and yes, this comparison is antiquated. But my question is about the gendering of space. What is female space? I don’t want to discuss this in the same way that theorist Erik Erikson does to explain why some little girls like to use domestic situations during their imaginary play. My interest comes into play when the gender conditioning of female space, such as the home, causes anxiety, particularly when women do not fulfill their biological destiny; When the home and or the womb are never filled and the cavernous space seems to illustrate Freud’s lack.

I am specifically speaking to the archetype of the old maid, or the spinster in nineteenth century female literature. In the book The Madwoman in the Attic, authors Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar speak about the anxieties of becoming a spinster in relation to the works of Mary Shelley and Emily Dickinson:

[T]roubled by the anatomical ‘emptiness’ of spinsterhood, [Mary Shelley] may, like Emily Dickinson, fear the inhabitations of nothingness and death, the transformation of womb into tomb. Moreover, conditioned to believe that as a house she is herself owned (and ought to be inhabited) by a man, she may once again but for yet another reason see herself inescapably as an object. (88)

We could also say that the panel or painting itself become the tomb for the females depicted on them, for they are forever frozen and preserved under a thick layer of resin.
Plato also wrote in Timaeus about the “wandering uterus.” As an explanation for what is now known as Hysteria, Plato theorizes that the womb remaining barren past the years of child rearing causes the female disease. These symptoms of Hysteria are explored in the work of Charlotte Perkins Gillman and Charlotte Bronte. In light of this I have to look at the piece She yearns for their whispers, layering space and light (Figure 2) and view it as depicting the spinster, or at least this fear of spinsterhood as mentioned above.

Figure 2. Melissa Herrington, She yearns for their whispers, layering space and light
Mixed Media on Panel, 7” x 7” x 2” each, 2009
Courtesy of the Artist and Soren Christensen Gallery

Perhaps this piece is not exactly about the fear of spinsterhood. No, I now would say that it is about the fear of not maturating, of not accomplishing the full transformation of girl into woman. The hole or dark oval in the last panel on the right could represent this anxiety around the destiny of biology- the urgency to fill this hole, this lack of the womb. However this dark oval could very well be a rabbit hole, or an escape out of the box.
No matter what females are still pretty little girls in boxes. According to Herrington’s new work our boxes as women in twenty-first century America may be bigger, but they are still as confining as ever.

Bibliography

Erikson, Erik. The Erik Erikson Reader. Ed. Robert Coles. New York: W.W. Norton &
Company, 2000.
Freud, Sigmund. The Freud Reader. Ed. Peter Gay. New York: W.W. Norton & Company,
1989.
Gilbert, Sandra M. and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and
the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. 2nd Ed. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000.
Plato. Timaeus and Critias Trans. Desmond Lee. New York: Penguin Classics, 1972.
---. Republic. Trans. C.D.C. Reeve. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2004.

Michelle Wiener

melissaannherrington@yahoo.com