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Over a period of several months I informally interviewed Melissa Stern, and the following observations are based on our conversations as well as an extended look at the work itself. (2) The resulting insights may not explain all aspects of her art, but her statement provides assurance that we are on the right track:
This series of drawings is about my memories of grade school. Like most children, I loved and hated school, couldn't wait to go on Monday and couldn't wait to leave on Friday. This push and pull of feelings is my central memory of childhood. One tends to think of children's emotional lives as relatively simple, even “elementary” as the saying goes. In hindsight, our inner lives were as complex and layered as they are today. We just use bigger words now. (3)
The following fragments from our recent discussions provide the essential clues to the meaning of the drawings. Despite Stern's resistance to talking about her work, characteristic of many artists, through these verbal exchanges the images take on a new life rich with associations and implications that might otherwise be missed.
The extent to which Melissa Stern lives just beneath the surface of her art becomes clear as she describes her relationship to it. According to her, at the core of her art making is the desire to be “known in the world”—as a person, not necessarily as an artist. Yet set against that impulse is fear of rejection and being judged, of not being accepted. This wanting to be known but being nervous about it is, for Stern, a reason to make art. Afraid to reveal her secrets, she can let them “sneak out” through her drawings. Uncomfortable and silent about many of the concerns she harbors, including the gender and girlhood issues that appear, the artist expresses them in pictorial code, what she calls a “sneakier way.” The tension that this conflict creates explains, for her, the unsettling and disturbing quality in her art. This psychological dimension appears throughout the drawings, notably in examples such as Dance, Lost, Mommy, and New Girl . In fact, most of these drawings betray an almost palpable anxiety.
One of the most revealing drawings, both literally and figuratively, depicts a standing nude girl, looking directly at the viewer with her right hand on a shapeless hip. One suspects that Most Likely is a self-portrait, and its message is youthful vulnerability and growing self-knowledge. The little girl with words (text from an old psychology book on hypnosis) for hair, budding breasts indicated, is a proto-sexual being, a Lolita type who is approaching awareness of the womanly powers that await her. But it is significant that this image, as is the case in much of Stern's sculpture as well as the drawings, is without genitals. This feature of Stern's figurative iconography more than invites Freudian analysis; it demands it—especially when one considers that all of the male figures are also deprived of genitalia. (4) Whatever one's interpretation of such anomalies, there seems to be no question that the nude (presumably) pre-pubescent girl represents the sexual insecurities and anxieties that accompany growing up.