 the one that got away, 2007 C-print, 23 K gold leaf, 9 x 9 inches Melanie Willhide The Belt of Venus In "The Belt of Venus", her newest series, Melanie Willhide taps the bliss and blindness of early love. The lovely pink arch after which the series is named appears in the sky for mere minutes, at sunrise and sunset. It is separated from the horizon by a darker layer, the Earth's shadow. This band of light becomes apt metaphor for the separation from, and passage through, the images of past loves. In keeping with her most recent working method, Willhide fabricates both front and backsides of images and carefully imitates the look of wear by hand. To beautify and delay de-composition, the marks of demise are covered with 14K gold leaf. This new addition to the project creates an iridescent veil, which, along with the hand made opaque backsides, prevents the images from being fully legible. In this way the images resemble the atmosphere of Venus, whose fleeting color frees admirers to speculate about conditions that are not explicitly apparent. There is bliss in the individual blindness Willhide imagines. Her bliss allows us access to our own pasts, to accept the indefinable and the lost as magic. Ultimately "The Belt of Venus" shares its comfortable definition of death: as sleep, as a dream, as a reunion with lost loves. In addition to the series of photographs, Willhide is exhibiting a sculptural work that distills many of her thoughts behind the creation of her photographic work. Willhide is a collector of vintage photographs for source material - her vermeil work "Untitled" draws from text written in pencil on the back of a photograph from the 1920's, the photograph seemed to be the first photographic image taken of the subject. On the photograph's back the subject had written about the thrill of the image. Willhide's work reflects on this "old new moment" - its romance, the physical photograph as a dying art, the impact that one's image can have on oneself, and the new meaning and context one applies to such a historical artifact. Exhibition: November 15 - December 22, 2007 Gallery hours: Tues-Sat 10 am - 6 pm Bellwether Gallery Project Room 134 Tenth Avenue (between 18th and 19th Streets) USA-New York, NY 10011 Telephone +1 212 929 5959 Fax +1 212 929 5912 Email info@bellwethergallery.com www.bellwethergallery.com |
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