The Disquieting Muses Again

"If the post-structuralists had ever penned their writings on chestnut beams, their graffiti might have looked much like Melanie Willhide’s The Disquieting Muses Again. A meditation on the construction (quite literally) of identity and desire, Willhide’s photographs of her uncle’s post-and-beam Connecticut mill--first erected in 1869--transform a reality already visibly mediated by language, and not to mention, weather. That there are “no real unaffiliated surfaces,” as Willhide puts it, is as true of the collection of 700 paintings within the old mill and the collaged beams that buttress it as it is of the artist’s own images of the space. All objects, we find, are already more than their material substrate.

In her collaboration across time with unknown authors and ecological processes, Willhide inverts the gaze fixed by men on women. Her work approximates the forensic in its examination of her male collaborators. Just as the muses on the beams and canvases ultimately escape the forced (and frankly ridiculous) ideal through their material deterioration, so too do the gender norms of desire and identity articulated by the space. We are never the image that others have of us. Nor should we be. As The Disquieting Muses Again ultimately reveals, we are already so much more than that.”

—Robyn Day