MELISSAHERRINGTON

Reviews

2010

HANDless: New Work

By Katey Schultz
If it is possible to paint in metaphor, Melissa Herrington’s HANDless is surely the epitome of this challenge. The twenty-one paintings installed in a brick-like formation at Gallery DeNovo work in concert to suggest the story of a “girl without hands” whose power lies in her perseverance and the anomaly of her condition. Individually, each panel conveys a distinct mood by altered pastures of blue, black, purple, and white. Other colors from the natural world provide contrast from piece to piece, creating a familiar feeling across unfamiliar terrain.

The strength of this body of work lies in such unfamiliarity. Herrington’s paintings are not immediately intuited, as layers of resin rise from the wood panels giving them a three-dimensional quality. Using her uniquely lyrical language, amorphous forms, lines, and openings, her paintings direct the eye inward and outward, ensnaring the viewer. This movement is immediately engaging on physical, emotional, and intellectual levels. It feels like visiting the underworld of déjà vous, where one walks carefully, trying to negotiate the rules of social conduct.

The work in HANDless is imbued with as much mystery as it is narrative. A sculptural installation, also featured in the main gallery, includes abstract trees with living moss—“skin” that keeps growing and changing color from light green to rich brown. Inspired by the poetry of Anne Sexton and Margaret Atwood, Herrington blended the narratives of their poems with her own aesthetic to conceive this body of work exploring the subterranean world of gender and transformation.

The undercurrent of gender entrapment and the determination of the “girl without hands” raise the stakes of this exhibition. Similar to the girl, a flowering tree also suffers amputation. Life still pulses through both, but they are permanently altered. In the underworld, the girl comes face-to-face with vulnerability and, in a parallel predicament, the tree risks extinction if it cannot transform. Together, they are reborn to the topside world, made anew on their own terms.

Herrington’s level of skill with challenging mediums, such as resin and plant material, not to mention her debut with three-dimensional sculpture, are all a testament to her endurance as an artist. Though not literally handless herself, the message here is clear—Herrington has also been remade by this latest body of work, an exemplar of the fact that metaphor has the power to transform.

2009

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.

2008

Where are the women?
Installation questions missing persons
By SABINA DANA PLASSE

When a societal issue touches an artist it can change his or her art and ultimately touch a viewer beyond words. When Melissa Herrington moved to Los Angles, she was struck by the disappearance of women in her community. In her new exhibition at Gallery DeNovo in Ketchum, Herrington presents "Lighght," which are new paintings and drawings and includes the installation, "The Los Angeles County Project."
"It is a changing perspective," Herrington said. "I am not relying on color. It is a direct referent of photography and a larger project about class and social issues."
The title, "Lighght," is borrowed from a minimalist poem by Aram Saroyan. Saroyan's controversial poem challenged traditional poetry because of its conceptual approach and is more than appropriate for Herrington because it plays upon words and the absence of letters.
Herrington's installation is like a graveyard, and consists of 200 pieces of black paper pinned with map pins on the wall. The charcoal drawings on black paper can be difficult to see, but that is the purpose. The drawings reflect women who used to exist and have now faded from society.

The ghostly images refer to the current list of missing women in Los Angles County, which Herrington has been researching since 2007. She updates her installation quite frequently, and the blank spaces in the installation are random, representing the ongoing issue of missing persons.
Herrington uses a grid formation for the installation, which is called the Herman grid. This type of grid creates the optical illusion of gray squares at the intersections of the black pieces of paper. This is another aspect to the work, which makes the images difficult to see and is the purpose as well as a major detail of the installation.
"People don't talk while viewing the installation," Herrington said. "It's the absence they are experiencing. I would venture to guess that there are more than double the women missing than are reported to the police department."
Herrington also points out that more often than not, the missing persons presented in the news are usually white, young and pretty—"damsels in distress." Her installation represents all women who are missing.
The installation is not for sale, and its purpose is to communicate the issue of missing women. It is an ongoing project, and can have a great deal of influence on finding missing women.

2009

As Quickly as a Flash

By Michelle Wiener

With the eerie sense of a graveyard, one enters an installation of more than two hundred plots of silent black paper pinned to the walls. At first glance, these papers seem absent of an image. Like voids hung in a grid formation, the work reads as an aerial view of an empty city. Then, something catches the light in the corner of your eye, and an image appears from the dark surface. Drawing you closer to the paper, the portraits of women emerge. As you step back, the women recede once again, vanishing from sight, but not from mind.
    Upon reading secondary text, one is informed of the identities of these women, or better yet, that these are missing identities. Stripped down to their name and photograph, one definitely reads these women as lost. The artist Melissa Herrington, through the creation of this collection of portraits, has been researching the missing women of Los Angeles County since February of 2007.   Presented in this installation is the current number of missing women in Los Angeles County.
    Herrington draws her portraits from the photographs provided on the Los Angeles Police Department website. The drawings, rendered on black paper in the transitory mediums of charcoal and graphite, only reinforce the women’s disappearances. The mediums are not preserved in fixative, and will fade over time.
    The women too shall fade from the list if they are not found, for after being on the missing person’s list for seven years, the lost person is declared deceased.
    Each portrait is only hung with two black map pins at the top corners. The papers move with the air as you walk by, fading the charcoal slowly, but also making you cautiously aware of your every move. The map pins refer back to the inability to locate these women. The color of the pins is also an aesthetic gesture about these women fading into the background, or in this case, getting lost within the system of missing persons. It is difficult to keep your eye on one portrait for a long amount of time. These portraits are read more as a group, or a human archive. However, out of respect once the secondary text in known, one tries to acknowledge the presence of each woman represented.
     However, in the installation of the drawings, Herrington provides another obstacle for her viewers other than the black on black renderings. The grid formation, otherwise referred to as the Herman grid, creates an optical illusion of grey squares in the intersections. They resemble the afterimage one receives after the flash of camera occurs. Again, referring to the photograph as an identification tool, the grey illusion also symbolizes the act of disappearing, for when one looks directly at the intersection, the illusion vanishes, as quickly as a flash.
The optical illusion of the grid also tires the eye, making it hard to look at the installation. This aspect of the work has one recall the countless mailings, posters, milk cartons, and reports on missing women. It is difficult to grab our attention on these matters. Or is it?
When it comes to the news presenting these stories of missing women, it seems to always be young, pretty, white women who get their attention. Most of us can recall Laci Peterson, JonBenét Ramsey, and Natalie Holloway. It seems that the media has a missing white woman syndrome, otherwise known as the missing pretty girl syndrome. If we look at all the characteristics of the victim that receives media coverage, we will see that the sex, race, age and appearance (attractiveness) all match the archetypal and stereotypical traits of the “damsel in distress”.
    One only needs to take one glance around the installation to see that Herrington is attempting to bring this issue of discrimination in the media to light. Represented here are all ages, races, creeds and classes of women. In fact, some of the portraits uncannily remind us of women we have seen and may have known in the past. The number of portraits also calls attention to fact that these are only the reported cases in Los Angeles County, and brings us to the question of what the actual number is.
    With the remembrance of these being actual women depicted and not drawings of fictional characters, Herrington brings up the function of photography as a way of remembering. Herrington states:
Photography has been used for many purposes- to memorialize, propagandize, record, lament and celebrate diverse human experiences. My interest is not only in the re-representation of the photograph’s capacity to precisely render but more in a transcendence of fixed positions by way of incandescent insight. Roland Barthes proposed that ‘photography exists not to represent but to remind, “ that it is the perspective connotation, cognitive connotation… ideological connotation and ethical connotation… which introduces reasons or values into the reading of an image.’
Yes, I would agree with Herrington that photography has been used to memorialize or record moments in the past that are literally dead time in comparison to the present. However, this project is not a disparaging vigil or a group of visual aids for a “Take Back the Night” rally as its formal qualities may have some to believe.   These works are harsher, because they do not let the viewers’ eyes stay fixed on them for long periods of time. They do not let you take pity or memorialize them in any way. They prefer to haunt you through the uncanny acts of repetition or déjà vu, for the amount of drawings alone lead you to believe that some of the drawings look similar to each other and or others you know. Regardless, the images stay with us even when they fade to black as we walk by.

2005

Atlanta Journal Constitution
VISUAL ARTS: Dreamlike images of interior life by  Jerry Cullum

Journal-Constitution  Sunday, April 17, 2005 "Melissa Herrington: Long Shadows"
Fay Gold Gallery, Atlanta Georgia April 1-30, 2005

Scenes seen in sleep are often elusive. Would-be realist paintings of such dreams are often both bad art and bad psychology, because they don't capture the loose, flickering quality of inner imagery.
By contrast, the loose array of dream symbols in Melissa Herrington's paintings feels authentic. Two girls in long dresses, fencing with blunt swords, wear masks tied with pink ribbons. A donkey-headed dancer in another painting seems like a creature midway between an Uncle Remus tale and "A Midsummer Night's Dream." Flowers, birds or an outline house appear here and there, mostly inconspicuous against the browns and ochers of the overall surface.
With the possible exception of a gold egg in a round alcove, nothing here appears made up or arbitrary. Even likely menstrual and genital references are rendered, as they would occur in a dream. The choice of alternate concave and convex panels as the surface for some paintings lends their scenes a creatively disorienting quality, whether we like the results or not.
But though Herrington's arrangements of symbols are richly her own, her means of expression resembles any number of other artists'. Her black silhouette figures dressed in antique costumes seem related to a recent lineage of evocative silhouettes that begins with Kara Walker. Her incidental symbols are more artfully understated than others.
To repeat, however: Herrington is not a copycat. She has her own vision of the interior world of myth and memory, and she communicates that vision better than most artists. But the issue of influence must be confronted. Some might say that Herrington's unconscious is shaped by the world she cares deeply about, namely, art. Painters' dreams look like bits from other paintings.
All that ought to count, ultimately, is that Herrington's artworks are real explorations of real internal experiences. Her dreamlike titles are marvels in themselves. "The Lily Confides. I Wait. Like Waves in the Sun, Drifting Girls Are Watched," "Hidden Passage. Visible Only to Those She Chooses" and "Drifting Away to High Noon, She Was Unspoken. Today Outshines" all reproduce the floating eloquence of dream language.

melissaannherrington@yahoo.com