Pride Exhibition featuring Melissa Wilkinson’s Surrogate Characters
THREE DOLLAR ICONS AND CHIMERA Series
Pride Exhibition featuring Melissa Wilkinson’s Surrogate Characters
THREE DOLLAR ICONS AND CHIMERA Series
The images from these paintings are culled from headshots and promotional images of Hollywood’s golden era. Known initially for their celebrity, these faces have underground followings divorced from mainstream heterosexual gazes. They serve as queer icons for either lives they led privately or their fan followings. They straddle the masculine and the feminine, emblematic of complex identity projections, attitudes, and tragic personas. They are surrogate characters, familiar and beautiful. They are who we want to live into when we desire to see ourselves differently. I have made minor interventions by cutting, reassembling and finally tenderly painting them, in order to create a kind of fractured likeness, one that is simultaneously monstrous and seductively tactile.
Mellissa Wilkinson