ARTIST
SPOTLIGHT
Up Close and Personal With: Melissa Stern
An interview with Patricia Pelehach – May 2006
Flying somewhat
under the radar of art world glitterati, Melissa Stern has, nonetheless,
had a very solid and successful career. She exhibits regularly in diverse
venues and her art graces a number of notable private and institutional
collections. While her primary output is in clay, her works on paper
explore many of the same themes and, like her clay work, are notable
for their spontaneity, raw emotional power and haunting quality. She
is also much valued as a teacher by those privileged to work with her
(this author among them).
Stern is
first and foremost an artist concerned with the human condition writ
small. She is a master at capturing fleeting, fugitive emotions — moments
of indecision and petty humiliations, yearnings quickly tamped down,
rage and terror in the living room, the exquisite torture of shyness,
the cleansing laugh of absurdity — all those inconvenient emotions that
we oh-so-quickly paper over with a veneer of bonhomie and our social
mask.
Born and raised in Philadelphia, educated as an anthropologist, now
a wife and mother living and working in the heart of New York’s Chelsea
district, Stern is happily female, happily urban (a country home upstate
helps preserve balance), relentlessly adventurous, and inexhaustibly
compassionate. Her sunny disposition belies the poignancy of her work.
The so-called “inner child” is an icon of contemporary pop psychology
and self-help books, but in Stern’s work the inner child is seen from
the safe distance of adulthood, an adult who knows that ultimately vulnerability
is strength, and geek passions are liberation. Her work tells the touching,
eventful, zany story of our humanness, how we hurt, how we ache, and
ultimately how we triumph.
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| BIRTHDAY
GIRL— clay, metal 24 x 6 x 11 1997 |
Almost always figural, even if stripped of limbs and appendages, Stern’s
work exists in a fuzzy state between universality and specificity. In
reviewing her 1996 show at the Bachelier Cardonsky Gallery in The New
York Times (December 15, 1996), William Zimmer said of Stern’s figures
that “in their essentialness they are patterns for all humans”, yet one
can argue that each is given a mark, an emblem, or characteristic that
makes the figure unique, an individual. Zimmer found the work
“reminiscent of preclassical Greek sculpture…not only because Ms. Stern
frequently leaves off limbs, mimicking the imperfect state in which ancient
works are usually discovered, but because the figures are usually intensely
rudimentary, cylinders topped by elongated spheres. They have no faces
but definite nobility nonetheless.” Vivien Raynor, also writing in The
New York Times (August 2, 1992) found African, Cycladic and Surrealist
influences in Stern’s work. In fact, Stern’s style is profoundly her own,
and her art, by turns gentle, compassionate, hysterical, vengeful, rueful
and funny, reflects the courage to own both “positive” and “negative”
emotions.
A wonderful quality of Stern’s work is its lasting freshness. “What?”
a rudimentary torso with red mugs for ears makes you laugh when you first
see it, and also makes you laugh every time you see it. The joke never
gets stale. “Birthday Girl” is a tiny tot dressed in frilly femininity
scowling her way through her own birthday party. It is a reminder of how
our own emotions — ever unreliable — sometimes make a hash of what should
be a pleasure. “Too Many Friends” comments on the limits of compassion
when our hearts are open, but our calendars are full.
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17
REASONS WHY—clay and mixed materials, 7 feet, 1989
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While she often worked very large earlier in her career. Her large sculpture
“17 Reasons Why” from 1989 is 7 feet tall. In the late 1990s, perhaps
because of the influence and exigencies of having a small boy, son Max,
in her home, Stern worked in a more intimate, “table top” size. Perhaps
Max inspired “Back to School”, a collection of drawings Stern exhibited
at the Children’s Museum of the Arts (NYC) in 2003, and “Vacation” a suite
of small clay and multi-media figures exhibited at the Spike Gallery (NYC)
that same year. Recently, with the production of “Birdland” a multi-figure,
multi-media installation — exhibited at the David Lusk Gallery (Memphis,
TN) in March 2006 — Stern has returned to scale as an integral part of
her work. It is a welcome change, putting her work on more of a museum
or institutional scale, and demanding attention on that level.
A consummate teacher, Stern is very articulate about her own work, and
can talk about her inspirations and processes with confidence and clarity.
“Birdland” refers both to the jazz great Charlie Parker, nicknamed Bird,
and to Birdland, the venue where
he often performed. Composed of 24 black and white figures
set in a field of 600 red silk poppies, Stern’s “Birdland” is
her tour de force. The figures are humanoid birds that bear an uncanny
resemblance (maybe it’s the beaks!) to the hapless cartoon figures of
Edward Koren in The New Yorker. These are not country birds. Their eyes
are startlingly human and knowing (Stern used artificial eyes for birds
and reptiles made for taxidermists).
The figures,
ranging in height from 10 to 43 inches, are assembled in a field of poppies,
the symbol of Morpheus, referring to the dream state of sleep or opium-induced
visions (Parker died at 34 of alcohol and heroin addiction). As
in all of her work, the figures are stripped down, reduced to their essence,
and in this case limited to two colors — black and white — in order to
emphasize their sculptural qualities. The larger figures stand over the
poppies, while the small figures are half-hidden, inviting interaction
on the part of the observer, who gradually discovers them amongst the
flowers.
The recipient of many awards and honors, Stern holds a Masters in Ceramics
from the State University of New York at New Paltz, and has exhibited
both nationally and internationally since 1983. In 2004, she was invited
to exhibit as a featured artist at the World Ceramic Biennale in Seoul,
Korea. The totality of her work exhibited was purchased for the permanent
collection of the new Contemporary Art Museum to open in Seoul in 2010.
Her work is included in the permanent collections of Dow Jones, Bear Stearns
and the Arkansas Art Center among others. A solo drawing exhibition is
scheduled at Wesleyan University in October, 2006.
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| BIRDLAND—installation.
Clay, paint, glass, graphite, steel, flowers, dirt. Approximately
20 x 20 feet, 2006 |
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