As a figurative artist for over two decades, New York-based Melissa Stern thinks constantly about the mechanics of the human body. With a background in anthropology, Stern’s work relates to Humanist ideas about the strengths and weaknesses of the human form.
Stern’s drawings, collages, and sculptures are richly layered with quirky and often dark humor. Working like a handyman, she cobbles together drawings and sculptures from elements found, borrowed, and imagined. The designs and engineering processes are in a constant state of evolution to accommodate the materials employed, as well as her personal considerations about fragility, stability, and motion.
Out for a walk in the winter of 2021, Stern had a fall after which she was literally – and defiantly – screwed back together, a notion that would directly influence the way she constructs her sculptures. Seated figures assembled with found materials are held together with overtly visible nails and screws. Couple (2024), a dual figure sculpture of clay, resin and found materials, depicts two incomplete humans who lack essential limbs yet stand together. The multi-panel drawing Bent (2023) attempts to be flexible in both mind and body in the face of a rigid world. Both her artwork and her experience invigorated Stern’s fascination with the engineering of the human body: “Look at how weird we are, these outsized torsos balanced on two legs that are asked to do so much each day. We lurch through the world, our being dependent on two funny feet that contain more bones and joints than anything else in the body. Of course, things go wrong, why wouldn't they?”
Stern equates her sculptures to a balancing act, her figure both celebrating and struggling with the world around them. There is an elegance and grace to these figures, propelled by the artist’s belief in the ultimate triumph of us as ridiculous humans.
Melissa Stern has worked in sculpture, photography and drawing for over twenty years, exhibiting throughout the United States, Europe, and Asia. Her exhibition, The Talking Cure has been traveling to institutions around the USA since 2012, including the Fuller Craft Museum, Brockton, MA (2022), Kranzberg Arts Center, St Louis, MO (2018), Weisman Art Museum, Minneapolis, MN (2016). Her work is featured in prominent corporate and museum collections including News Corporation, JP Morgan, Arkansas Art Center, American Museum of Ceramic Art (Pomona, CA), Racine Art Museum (Racine, WI), and the Weisman Art Museum (Minneapolis, MN).
Stern also has served as a contributing writer or editor for Hyperallergic, Art Critical, and ArtSpiel. She has covered major exhibitions on assignment throughout the world. She served earlier as the principal art critic for The New York Press. She is a past Board Director of The Children’s Museum of the Arts in NYC, Watershed Center in Maine, and contributing curator of the Human Rights Film Festival from 2008-2015.
THE LIVING ROOM is the street facing exhibition space at DIMIN. Melissa Stern’s Living Room exhibition will run concurrently with Stephen Thorpe’s Dream House in the main gallery.