MELISSA STERN: MEMORY, MARKINGS, THE PAST
“Back to School,” Children’s Museum of the Arts, 2003

Paul J. Karlstrom

The art of Melissa Stern is deceptive in its playful, childlike quality. She is best known for her highly imaginative (and frequently amusing) ceramic sculpture, usually involving the human figure. Most of her figures, whether sculptural or drawn, call to mind sophisticated illustrations for children's stories. Stern would readily acknowledge the connection many viewers will make between the drawings in this exhibition and those in the best children's books. However, she sees her work removed from specific narrative and functioning instead in terms of psychology and metaphor. As much as we would like a ceramic standing figure—feet nailed to the floor, arms holding aloft a branch upon which large birds perch—to introduce a fascinating if disturbing fable, there is no story to explain it. Or put another way, the figure itself, and the associations it produces in the mind of the viewer, is the story.

Stern is careful to create images strictly from her own personal experiences and concerns, past and present, and the imaginative equivalents they suggest to her. The narrative, if there is one, is the secret world of Melissa Stern. What elevates these images to the status of compelling works of art is her willingness to share her world. She does so in a calculated or strategic way, through fantastic images intended to create for the viewer mental and sensory aids that become bridges to the past. Although Stern is loathe to speak directly to meaning and artistic intention in her work, preferring to allow it to make its magic without interference, it is clear that she is using memory and the past to provide the keys to self-discovery in the present.

During the modern era, especially in recent decades, the most compelling and thought-provoking images have been drawn from personal experience. At the core of such creative endeavor is a preoccupation with the “self” and one's place in a confusing and frequently threatening world. There is, however, a danger in this creative “personalism” that the perspective developed and conveyed may become myopically self-indulgent. Individual anxieties and neuroses, eagerly confessed in autobiographical revelations, seek elevated positions of universal interest and application, the world and life in general then to be apprehended through the artist's own experience and observations. Therein lies the main risk of this mining of the self for glimpses of truth and meaning. But, handled sensitively and with humility, as is the case with these drawings by Melissa Stern, the excavation of one individual's past can provide in art a useful model, a reminder of where we viewers also may look as we seek to understand who and what we have become. Stern's art, in its honesty and directness, accomplishes this elusive and difficult goal. Memory provides the key. (1)