The Belt of Venus

In The Belt of Venus Melanie Willhide taps the bliss and blindness of early love. The lovely pink arch after which the series is named appears in the sky for mere minutes, at sunrise and sunset. It is separated from the horizon by a darker layer, the Earth’s shadow. This band of light becomes apt metaphor for the separation from, and passage through, the images of past loves. In keeping with her most recent working method, Willhide fabricates both front and backsides of images and carefully imitates the look of wear by hand. To beautify and delay de-composition, the marks of demise are covered with 14K gold leaf. This new addition to the project creates an iridescent veil, which, along with the hand made opaque backsides, prevents the images from being fully legible. In this way the images resemble the atmosphere of Venus, whose fleeting color frees admirers to speculate about conditions that are not explicitly apparent. The result allows us access to our own pasts, to accept the indefinable and the lost as magic. Ultimately, The Belt of Venus shares its comfortable definition of death: as sleep, as a dream, as a reunion with lost loves.