Melissa Dadourian
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"string girl",thread, needles, paint, 135 x 80"
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Playgirl / Saint
My work is an attempt to create an experience of reverence and explore the notion of what Heidegger terms, “the essence of life”, through the transformation of the everyday. I utilize the concept of transfiguration as a way to understand reality and what Lacan speaks of as raw reality, "la réelle". What one interprets or experiences in reality is dependent on language and is undefined, almost dreamy. My interest lies in the transformation of the female image in order to create a “suspended space” of reverence; a heightened reality that reveals a great beauty and admiration.
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"May 1969", oil on wood, 13 x 14
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Inspiration is drawn from the Renaissance paintings of Saints. These paintings seem to capture a type of reverence in relation to the viewer's experience, elevating the perspective from visual to revelatory in the form of epiphany.
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"string girl" detail
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"December 1969", oil on wood, 12 x 18, 2004
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"putting on nylons", video still
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Unlike the paintings of Saints, the figures I use in my work are appropriated from the Playboy magazines that I secretly gazed at as an adolescent girl. I remove these women from the context of “pornography” and place them in a position of exaltation. An object not only to be desired sexually but admired or revered in an almost spiritual way.
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"November 1969", oil on wood, 13 x 14
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In my painting, installation and video work there is a suggestion of the notion of female freedom expressed through a naiveté or innocence, whether the figure is drawn in paint, a piece of thread connected by nails or putting on a pair of nylons. It is all an attempt at heightening the everyday in order to comprehend existence, the essence of life and the real.
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