Artists
Melissa Dadourian
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A strand of DNA. A spider's web. The stitches across a wound. The perception of life is fleshy, heavy, but it is the gossamer thread that knots us to our bodies. Nature itself, reduced to the rudiments of raw data, is the wavy line: the rings of a tree, the stratus of sedimentary rock, the concentric swirls of topographical and satellite maps.
In the work of Melissa Dadourian, the line maps sexual/cultural identity. Outlining 60s and 70s pictorials from Playboy Magazines, Dadourian fashions iconological fossils. The line is raised, suggesting a physical body long since passed into an ephemeral state; the colors are primarily two-tonal, taking on not only a layering effect, but also the period hues of the pictorials. Liberated from their own eras, the images are reasserted, recast. Dadourian's subject is not one of exploitation, but of transgression; any patriarchal architecture is supplanted by a more intrinsic expression of the female divine. They are not playmates, but in Dadourian's term "playgirls," representing emancipation from social constraints, and history itself. Melissa Dadourian has shown internationally since 1995, when she received her MFA from Hunter College. She lives and works in New York City. |