Artist Melissa Stern’s uniquely interactive multimedia installation, The Talking Cure, opens Friday at The Gallery at the Kranzberg Arts Center with a reception from 6 to 9 p.m. It’ll remain up through May 27.
The provocative and witty installation consists of a dozen of Stern’s sculptures, but that’s only the beginning. While the artist isn’t going to direct your thoughts on the pieces, they do have plenty to say for themselves.
Literally.
After completing the sculptures, New York-based Stern recruited a dozen writers to choose one that they resonated with. The writers each produced a monologue based on what they felt or thought about the specific piece they chose, which Stern then handed over to a cadre of twelve actors, to choose and perform.
Each sculpture has a QR code you activate with your phone to hear the piece performed.
The exhibition, which has been touring since 2012, evokes participation, thought, and conversation from its viewers. That, and the name for the Freudian system of therapy, lead to the name: The Talking Cure.
“I wish I could tell you that it was completely strategic,” says Stern. “Instead, it really is kind of representative of the way I work as an artist in general. For many years, people would look at my work and say, ‘Well, what does that mean?’ I found myself turning it back on them and saying, ‘What do you think it means?’’
The project required Stern to let go of her work and surrender it to the writers, who in turn had to surrender their work to the actors. And the actors did their own letting go, with specific sculptures and words dictated to them.
Artists of all stripes, Stern observes drily, tend to rather enjoy control of their work.
“I found myself in this position of letting go of my artwork, giving it to the writer,” she says. “I would not dictate or censor anything they wrote. Then the writers had to let go of their monologues and let the actors interpret them.”
She says that while her work is clearly situated in cultural, psychological, and narrative contexts, those are not where she starts. Her work begins based on simple elements—a color, a shape, an object. The rest fills itself in as she works, and interpretation and assigning meaning are left to the viewer.
“I’m more interested in what you’re thinking than what I have to tell you. I have a real kind of primal aversion to work that tells you what to think,” Stern says.
The works are figurative sculptures, ranging in size from able to fit on a tabletop to about the size of an 8-year-old kid. Kids, she says, tend to find them funny. Adults see them and often think of their own past traumas.
“Oh my god, it’s like therapy!” she says. “Therapy is all about letting go, ridding yourself of things that are holding you back. I forced everybody, including myself, to let go.”
Other resident organizations of the Kranzberg Arts Center will create works in response to the show, and those works will be on display at a showcase at the exhibition’s close on May 27. Stern, she says, is intensely grateful to the Kranzberg for the chance to bring the show to St. Louis and work with the community.
“I have found myself really working with a project that is about community engagement, and about each specific place where it lands,” says Stern. She collects community response through onsite programming, observation, and comment books.
A showing on a college campus brought different results than one for grade schoolers, and one for veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder was entirely distinct than the one that was part of a music festival.
