MELISSA VANDENBERG: SMOKE 'EM IF YOU GOT 'EM

January 18 - March 1, 2019

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Maus Contemporary is excited to announce Melissa Vandenberg: Smoke ‘em if you got ‘em., the artist’s second one-person exhibition with the gallery.

Drawing on fifteen years of innovation across a diverse range of media including sculpture, works on paper and performance, in S.O.S. Vandenberg challenges viewers, ever so softly, to consider their personal constructions of self, identity, place and nation. As she states on her website, “identity is in the home we create, the goods we possess and in the land we live.”

Melissa Vandenberg

Homewrecker

2019

sewing machine, knives, deer hide, chair, brick, and mixed media

as installed approx. 42 by 60 by 55 in. (ca. 106,7 by 152,4 by 139,7 cm)

In her practice, Vandenberg has challenged the apparent duality of gender on multiple occasions, including in more recent work like the piece Homewrecker. In this work, Vandenberg has constructed a sewing station precariously propped up on a variety of knives, all of which sit on a flattened deer hide, while a brick placed on the pedal keeps the machine running. Like with her monument, the sewing machine itself is a synecdoche for womanhood. The metaphorical reference to womanhood is made more apparent through the fact that it is a “homemaker” brand machine, calling to mind one of the central elements of women’s labor and identities for centuries. At the same time, the knives—bowie knives along the base of the machine and throwing knives extending down the legs of the chair—coupled with the skinned deer hide allude to hunting, one of the most traditional and archetypal roles for men going back to hunter/gatherer societies.

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click on UNDER MAIN MAGAZINE logo to read the full article by Emily Elizabeth Goodman.

Vandenberg's studio practice explores the political landscape using national identity, folk art, ancestry, immigration and the perception of a homeland as points of departure. She gravitates to everyday materials like matches, fabric, stickers, wood, temporary tattoos and found objects. Born and educated in Detroit, Melissa Vandenberg is a multidisciplinary artist, educator and curator living and working in Richmond, KY where she is an Associate Professor of Art at Eastern Kentucky University and Director of the University's Giles Gallery. Repetition is a motif central to Vandenberg's production. Recalling Gilles Deleuze's pronouncement that only that which is alike differs, and only differences are alike, Vandenberg inserts selected symbols, such as stars or stripes, and certain texts, such as the word PATRIOT, within many of her works.

It is almost as if Vandenberg has taken the negative space created by removing the term from the former and layered it over the latter creating an oscillating relationship between these two series.

It is this type of subtle understandings of the ways in which an artist can move within and between media that makes Vandenberg's long history as a practitioner evident. Rather than be trapped within the confines of a medium for fear of stepping outside it, she is as comfortable within one as she is within another. She also revisits methods, but reinterprets their meanings. Drawing on the matchstick drawing methods of her 1998 Untitled (Match Drawing Series) works, Vandenberg is now producing new pieces which scorch paper, but she has turned towards the figurative, using many of the same icons that appear in her collages and three-dimensional works.

Melissa Vandenberg

EX*PAT*RIOT

2016

match burns on Arches paper
approx. 27.5 by 29.5 in. (ca. 70 by 75 cm)

"To understand Melissa Vandenberg's public-facing finished work, it's crucial to understand the private aspects of her compositional process. Several months ago, the artist sent me video documentation of her burn-drawing process, filmed from a tripod in the corner of her studio. In the center of the frame, Vandenberg had laid out the second panel of her drawing Glory Days on a work table. Matches comprising the lower half of the letter "e" were lined up neatly, side by side, their sticks fanning out. The scene was not precious; behind the work table were studio odds and ends, including Tupperware containers and a tote bag. Once she lit the match, however, the visual noise, the humdrum of the studio, faded away. Watching the footage, it's impossible to not be captivated by the meditative spectacle of the row of matches aflame. The burning went fast, and after a few seconds, Vandenberg's hand reached into the frame to extinguish the matches. Like a bodily afterimage, her red hair peeked into the lower corner of the frame as she leaned forward to examine her work.

The whole video clocks in at one minute. Still, the footage gives a sense of the push-and-pull of Vandenberg's process, an oscillation between the careful plotting of her drawings and the chance act of burning. If one of her burns, which she also calls "brands," goes awry, the whole work must be started over again. Each attempt, then, is a leap of faith, the work a ritual with an almost spiritual sense of commitment.

The finished Glory Days illustrates the words "glory daze," rendered through burns in a lowercase cursive font. When mounted, the tail from the "y" in glory and the "d" in daze align but do not touch, separated as they are over two sheets of paper with a small gap between them. The near touch brings a host of associations to mind, from the art-historical - Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel fresco The Creation of Adam - to the metaphorical, fractious political divisions in the U.S. (...) "

- Wendy Vogel

excerpt of Incendiary Motives by Wendy Vogel, published in Vandenberg's 2022 monograph smoke 'em if you got 'em

Over the past fifteen years, the artist Melissa Vandenberg has been working across a diverse range of media, including sculpture, works on paper and performance, to challenge the viewers to consider their personal constructions of self, identity, place and nation. As Vandenberg explains, her art “questions the notion of a ‘homeland’ and how national identity intertwines with individual identity.”

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click on WIDEWALLS logo to read the full article by Jelena Martinović.