Melissa Vandenberg
melissavandenberg.com
melissavandenberg.com
Stuffed Kirkja (Church), Antique French toile, lame, polyester, and thread, 20" x 40" x 20", 2019
Glerkirkjur (Glass Churches), Glass, variable (approx. 22" x 18" x 36"), 2019
Home is part object, part duty, and part performance. As populations shelter amid COVID-19, we confront the notion of home as a place of both refuge and isolation. Our homes can carry a great deal of privilege or pain–depending on wealth, job security, family, and the immediate community. Through hardship, artists continue to work at home, we continue to create, and ponder how our work, and the world, might change while we weather a pandemic.
Stuffed Kirkja and Glerkirkjur are forms where phallic steeples meet the space of home. The shapes are absurd and sexual, an odd architecture for troubled souls. I have revisited the basic iconographic house structure in my studio practice for over 2 decades, but a long trip to Iceland in 2017, inspired another look. Since then, I have made several trips back and forth to Scandinavia, looking for familial connections to my Nordic roots. The simplicity of this familiar house/church is striking, its roofline ideal to shed the elements. It signifies an overlap of male and female attributes to our domestic lives, a place where power is gained and relinquished, and faith offered and discarded.
Stuffed Kirkja and Glerkirkjur are forms where phallic steeples meet the space of home. The shapes are absurd and sexual, an odd architecture for troubled souls. I have revisited the basic iconographic house structure in my studio practice for over 2 decades, but a long trip to Iceland in 2017, inspired another look. Since then, I have made several trips back and forth to Scandinavia, looking for familial connections to my Nordic roots. The simplicity of this familiar house/church is striking, its roofline ideal to shed the elements. It signifies an overlap of male and female attributes to our domestic lives, a place where power is gained and relinquished, and faith offered and discarded.
Artist Statement
"Beautiful like the chance meeting on a dissection table of a sewing machine and an umbrella." - Comte de Lautréamont
With ordinary materials the work addresses the fleeting nature of power and a lack of permanence with both the tangible and metaphysical. Inspiration is garnered from Americana relics, eastern religious practices and materials that make up “home.” We impose a lot of metaphors on objects and possessions, which affects my chosen iconography. Flags, maps, Buddha silhouettes and gravestones are altered into somewhat antagonistic forms. Questions surrounding patriotism, pride and partisanship begin to emerge in work that is both satirical and idealistic. The results are overwhelmingly about mortality, but not exclusively dark or negative. Subtexts touch on resurrection, reincarnation and even recycling.
Most work is made with ordinary supplies like matches, quilts, stickers, popsicles, temporary tattoos and other domicile goods. I am partial towards the “familiar,” in hopes of making the challenging subjects addressed in the work more accessible. There is not one mode or material that is preferred over another, but I often find myself gravitating towards sculpture in addition to working with drawing, collage, photography, installation and performance.
My upbringing in the suburbs of Detroit, a northern "Rust Belt" metropolis, combined with Southern “make do” perseverance, has had an enormous impact on my art. Repetition is a predominant motif, reminiscent of assembly line manufacturing from my Detroit origins, but this is combined with the hand-made (aka woman-made). Nationalism, particularly in the US, motivates work that questions the notion of a “homeland” and how national identity intertwines with individual identity.