Melissa Hespelt (b. 1996; Sparta, NJ) is a multimedia artist whose work hinges on the multivalence of feminine aesthetics, examined through an ongoing forensic engagement of the accoutrement of glamor. Hespelt constructs remnants of an imagined, elemental feminine presence, often contextualizing remnants of beauty products and items of clothing as the raw components of experimental material practices and fantastical natural processes. Detached from the bodies that these objects might have adorned or constricted, objects like wigs and dresses take on their own lives, transformed through processes that walk a fine line between destruction and play.

Hespelt’s practice takes an imaginative approach to the afterlives of feminine trappings, subjecting found objects to processes such as exhumation, freeze, thaw, and decay. These transformations position high heels, tights, and rhinestones as materials not unlike the components that make up the landscape. In Hespelt’s material realm, glamor is both the death of feminine capital and its apotheosis, introducing an unbounded material potential for mutation

Physical transformation, in Hespelt’s hands, is a manifestation of the transfigurative nature of femininity under capitalist structures. Hespelt locates a dual capacity for beauty and for abjection within this power, and amplifies this into a force that seems to emanate from glamorous figures across history, echoing elements of figures like Marilyn Monroe, Cicciolina, or Anna Nicole Smith. Components from Hespelt’s own closet and library come apart and back together again, drawing on horror as much as allure. Julia Kristeva conceptualizes the “monstrous-feminine” in her 1982 volume Powers of Horror, a notion of monstrousness that hinges on femininity and womanhood as essential elements to the inverse of the male monster. Hespelt sublimates this circular relationship of value, beauty, and ugliness into a formal and emotional relationship of raw materials and loaded signifiers.

(Text by Jonathan Leib)