text:
Lise Melhorn-Boe: RE Books
by NO and NO
This interview was commissioned by Modern Fuel-Artist-Run Centre to accompany the May 2017 exhibition in the Flux Gallery at MFARC. Used with permission.
Harvesting Environmental Justice: The Bookworks of Lise Melhorn-Boe
by Heather Saunders
Telling and Retelling: Some Remarks on the Bookworks of Lise Melhorn-Boe
by Gil McElroy
Past Lives
by Joan Murray
Creative Meaning-making
by Tara Hyland
by Carolyn Langill
Fairy Tales and Family Fables
by Tara Hyland-Russell
Sometimes You've Got to Wake Up the Frog
by Tara Hyland-Russell
Lise Melhorn-Boe: RE Books
NO and NO (Gabriel Cheung and Katharine Vingoe-Cram)
Written in 2017, for the exhibition, The RE Books, at Modern Fuel Artist-Run Centre, Kingston, Ontario. NO and NO is a collaborative art practice and the extension of the artists' hypertrophied friendship. They have worked together since 2014, while attending graduate school in Kingston, and often take as a starting point the personal stories that they tell to themselves and to each other. Past work has explored collective drawing practices, particularly drawing as a mnemonic device, and the affective experiences of kinships and coexistence.
Used with permission of Gabriel Cheung, Katharine Vingoe-Cram and Modern Fuel Artist-Run Centre.
Ten minutes into our visit with Lise Melhorn-Boe, the floor around our feet is teeming with over a hundred stuffed fabric shapes—they pile up, clinging to one another, trailing into all corners of the room. The shapes are in fact fabric "tubes," wrestled into letters by Melhorn- Boe via some creative sewing tricks and joined into words. Coming in a variety of patterns, colours and textures, they invite touch (and we oblige). Melhorn-Boe talks excitedly about how the words will hang from up high, vine-like, combining her individual bookworks into an installation; we get excited about walking through this haptic forest of squishy letters.
The playfulness and "cuteness" of the works are perhaps most conspicuous—and put to greatest use—in the darkest, most dismal stories here, recounting experiences about bodily setbacks or interpersonal dysfunctions with humour. Putting the books away at the end of our conversation, Melhorn-Boe is careful with the works, without being precious about them—the way she handles stories in this exhibition feels similar.
NO & NO: The title of your show is RE Books and these works were made to read as books, in that the words come out of covers, with titles, instead of standing alone. We were curious about what a book is to you?
Lise Melhorn-Boe: I have been making books for forty years and I call myself a book artist. And so, I think of what I make as books. These are definitely books to me—they have covers, they open, they have text inside. It just happens to be quite fat, bouncy text that spills out of the covers.
N&N: Annette Messager's Sewn Words were mentioned earlier as a source of inspiration for your RE Books, and formally, the works look very similar. At the same time, the use of repetition here leads us to read your books differently. There are formal repetitions, with all the words beginning in RE—for example, reawaken, remember, readjust—but also invisible, manual repetitions that constitute the making of these works, where you're sewing a lot of Rs and a bunch of Es. We were thinking about how this repetition relates to memory as persistent work.
LM-B: Certainly doing something over and over again is a way of remembering it. I will definitely remember for the rest of my life making these letters. There's a reason why people use mantra for meditation. I do Kundalini Yoga and we do a lot of chanting and it is very calming and soothing. Similarly, I have found it very enjoyable and relaxing to sit and make these letters. A lot of people who do hand work as artists feel that. It certainly is meditative. Because of my son's brain injury, memory has played a large role in my household's life in the past few years. And so I've been thinking a lot about memory and these pieces have kind of coalesced a lot of the vague thinking that I've been doing over the past few years.
N&N: You've brought up aspects of your son's story, which are intertwined with your own and make their way into your works. You've also mentioned how your sister was not only the inspiration for one of the books, but also a collaborator, in that she chose one of the RE words. The books, from the clues on the covers to the words inside, seem charged with these personal stories, not just about yourself but also variously about people close to you, people you've encountered. What are your thoughts on telling these stories publicly and navigating these public disclosures?
LM-B: In my earlier work, where I was looking at women's life experiences, including with their bodies, I would create questionnaires and circulate them, starting with friends. But then they would send them to people that I didn't even know! I'd ask for stories, with the understanding that I was going to use their stories, and people would get excited about the questionnaires because they liked being part of it! Not all of the work directly pertained to me but all the subjects that I was exploring were things that I was interested in. What I found was that so many people could relate to the stories because, although people's stories may be specific, chances are someone else has experienced the same thing. Didn't somebody say they are no new stories?
N&N: We were also interested in thinking about the ways in which you tell stories in these books. They seem to very much be aware of and engaged with this question of legibility.
LM-B: Because of the nature of the material, the words sometimes spin and sag, and so it will be a little bit of a challenge for the reader to read the words. But there are only three words for each book, so I think that it's not going to be too arduous a task.
N&N: Yes. And we love how the works are sometimes generous, divulging their stories in these playful and colourful ways; but sometimes they are also shy, spinning and sagging, as you say, away from readers' sights, withholding their stories and only revealing three words.
LM-B: It's true that if you can't read the words you are not going to get the complete story. But in this case, I won't say I don't care, but I'm so excited about the shapes of the letters and the sculptural effect and as I mentioned the spaces in between. I think if someone just comes and looks and says "wow that's cool," that's probably fine too; and if they want to delve in and actually look at the title of the book and then try to read the words they are going to get more out of it. I have really worked with colour as well—you can get a sense of whether this is a happy book or a sad book just seeing what colours I've used. So even if you couldn't read each word, you might get something from it.
Harvesting Environmental Justice
Heather Saunders
Written in 2014, for the exhibition, It's Fine...It's Fine...Everthing's Just Fine, at the Window Gallery, Kingston School of Art, Kingston Ontario. Heather Saunders is an artist and the author of artistintransit.blogspot.com. She is adjunct faculty in the Department of Fine and Peforming Arts at Nipissing University, where she also works as a librarian..
Used with permission of Heather Saunders.
"Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap. I have aimed to tell the truth as I saw it. If this book shall have borne ever so feeble a hand in garnering a harvest of justice, it has served its purpose." ~ Jacob Riis
In 2008, I took the bus from Ottawa to Kingston to visit Lise Melhorn-Boe. I arrived feeling agitated because it was only days after the grisly death of Tim McLean aboard the very bus line with which I was travelling—one province west, granted, but far too close for comfort. Unbelievably, southern US Baptists interpreted it as pay-back for the Canadian tolerance of abortion, homosexuality, and adultery.
While we visited outdoors on a beautiful summer day, the artist described the health symptoms caused by mold in her house in North Bay, which had forced her to sleep in her front porch in the dead of winter. She relayed these details while cheerily stitching photographs of houses on her street into pages that would form the book, Homeless (2008). Then we played a game with her son, who had recently come out of a coma following a car accident, because it was good for cognitive recovery. (This too would become the subject of a bookwork, Diffuse Axonal Injury: April 14, 2008 [2014]). By the time I left, my nerves were settled, and I dare say I felt slightly optimistic about life in general
That's her gift: making lemonade out of lemons—pesticide-laden lemons flown across international borders or organic lemons packaged in frustratingly non-recyclable materials. She uses her own and others' stories to challenge the viewer to consider that maybe it's not all completely a lost cause, that maybe society won't collectively win the Darwin Awards and bring about its own obsolescence through intolerance and carelessness. The fact that only some of her stories have silver linings reinforces that it could go either way. One that stands out is Gypsy Moth (2007), about a woman who was incapacitated after accidentally being aerially sprayed with pesticide intended for gypsy moths; amazingly after two and a half grueling years, after deciding that she would indeed recover, she did just that.
Melhorn-Boe has witnessed firsthand the benefits of shifting perspective. Reminiscent of Hannah Wilke before Wilke was diagnosed with cancer and making uncharacteristically expressionistic self-portraits in watercolour, Melhorn-Boe turned to the same medium and envisioned herself healing from the mold-related symptoms in the book, Mind Over Matter (2010). The book's first image is a Nancy Spero-esque grey, zombie-like frontal portrait with a double head and bruises against a background that resembles shattered glass. In the final image, the artist assumes a more dynamic pose, in profile and dancing to what must be groovy 1960's music based on the bright biomorphic forms in the background and her equally vibrant attire.
As a society, we are in desperate need of such a perspectival shift. Every person I've told about Melhorn-Boe using empty potato chip bags as garbage bags has responded with, "She must eat a lot of chips!" No, I explain: she's hardly a glutton; her diet is very healthy. She just diligently minimizes the amount of garbage she produces. They can't seem to wrap their heads around it. Her compost bin contains things most people have probably never even heard of composting, and her recycling bin contains not just her own refuse, but bottles and cans she has found on the street while cycling. Naysayers can check out her books, Garbage (2007) and More Garbage (2010), which incorporate all of the garbage, with the exception of organic waste, that she generated during a given period of time (plus some gloves and mittens found in the streets during the creation of the latter work). In these works, to borrow a term from South African Zanele Muholi who documents positive and negative subject matter to fight social injustice, Melhorn-Boe functions as a visual activist.
In viewing her environmental bookworks collectively, there is a disturbing sense of humanity being at risk from day one, evident in Endangered Species (2011), which features pink and blue onesies; Toxic Kids (2009), a paperdoll book; and Home Sweet Home (2009), a quilted dollhouse. Melhorn-Boe's cautionary tales are often delivered with a wry sense of humour, rhyming couplets, and formats ranging from tunnel books to star carrousel books. These appealing features have a similar resonance as the stereotypical woman saying in a suspiciously enthusiastic tone, "I'm fine." In an interview in 2012, Melhorn-Boe told me that she felt that in spite of her lighthearted approach, audiences had an attitude of, "I don't want to know this" in response to this particular body of work. However, just as placating the woman who says, "I'm fine" will lead to no good, these are tales that need to be told—not unlike the bookwork that might be seen as the precedent for It's Fine… It's Fine… Everything's Just Fine. That book is Jacob Riis's How the Other Half Lives, a photo-documentary exposé of the deplorable living conditions in turn-of-the-century tenement buildings.
The convergence of art and book for social reform dates back at least to 1890 with Riis, but the modern concept of the artist's book really developed in the 1960s, coincidentally (in the context of Melhorn-Boe) in lockstep with the environmental movement. Her early works focused on feminism; for example, the house motif was used to convey abuse in Little House/Happy Home, and in fact, uses the same Little House quilt pattern as Homeless. Then her work shifted to ecofeminism with works like Toxic Face Book and Body Map (2009) and the effect of the environment on women's health became her focus during an artist residency at Queen's University in 2006. The lines blur between art imitating life and life imitating art, providing fertile ground for the harvest.
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Telling and Retelling: Some Remarks on the Bookworks of Lise Melhorn-Boe
Gil McElroy
Written in 2006 for the exhibition, Once Upon a Time. Gil McElroy is a poet, artist, critic, and independent curator. He currently lives in Colborne, Ontario with his wife Heather.
© Gil McElroy. Used with permission.
Erratum: The book entitled Germangoodgirls was created in collaboration with Clarissa Lewis. We constructed the book over several months with parcels and emails flying back and forth between our studios in North Bay and Toronto. Long distance collaboration was an unusual way of working for both of us, one that we thoroughly enjoyed.
In many ways, it could be argued that the artist's book is the quintessential
20th-century artform. ~ Johanna Drucker
Once upon a time there was black and white television. I'm old enough to have grown up with it, and remember the excitement in our Tacoma, Washington neighbourhood when my father purchased a colour television in time to watch the first Superbowl. It had pride of place in the rarely used living room, while its b&w ancestor was relegated to the family room.
That was in the mid-1960s. Colour television was relatively new on the market, but by no means a new technology. Its "untimely" early development had, in fact, posed a significant threat to the market for black and white sets, so the leading corporations of the time sat on the new kid for awhile so as to be able to recoup their investment in its older sibling first.
I relate this story by way of talking about the book and, more specifically, about artist Lise Melhorn-Boe's bookworks. Television (and I apologize to radio) was arguably the "quintessential" technological development of the twentieth century, and if American book artist Johanna Drucker is right in her assertion made at the start of her The Century of Artists' Books (New York: Granary Books, 1995), then I think there is a parallel that makes it worth the mention.
These days, television is an evolving technology, but the book as we've known it since the days of Gutenberg is a technology under threat of something akin to extinction. Handheld electronic readers into which a text can be downloaded have been a reality for some time, though the obvious technological advantages of the traditional book form—portability, ease of access, no power requirements, etc.—have kept its electronic offspring at bay. So far, anyway. The proverbial writing is on the wall; the inevitability of an entirely new technology finally superseding what is actually a very old technology (that indeed predates Gutenberg) is becoming more and more apparent. As far as technologies go, the book as we've known it has had a good run.
But the artist's book is another issue entirely. By and large outside of the commercial impetus that has driven book technology, emancipated of its commodity status, the artist's book is free to explore other aesthetic, social, political and cultural terrain. It is so with Melhorn-Boe's work.
That's not to argue that the critical conventions of the book are dispensed with in Melhorn-Boe's work; she is, in large part, observant of them—like, for example, the codex structure comprising individual pages bound together at a central spine, or the book as a linear narrative device. With her Once Upon a Time, Melhorn-Boe turns these conventions in upon themselves. It's a cloth work comprised of square stitched panels joined together to form a 12-panel long linear structure when entirely unfolded. On each cloth square is a word or sequence of words that, collectively read through the sequence of panels, form a coherent sentence. Or actually, sentences, for every second panel section is itself a multiple thing, a compendium of seven panels joined together at the top with metal rings and which affords the opportunity for the construction (depending on which panels are flipped into place) of variant sentences and thus possible meanings. All, however, must start with a non-variable: the familiar narrative device, "Once upon a time…" It's all about storytelling.
At the core of Melhorn-Boe's work is storytelling, and so its narrative conventions are of enormous aesthetic use as devices of social response and reaction. In her books Cinderella, Beauty and the Beast, and Many-Fur, Melhorn-Boe creates feminist retellings of classic fairy tales using advertising imagery and snippets of text culled from popular fashion magazines set within the narrative form established by the works' codex form and heightened via the use of complex pop-up and fold-out structures of the kind often found in children's literature. As with all of Melhorn-Boe's work, content and form mutually support one another, ensuring that one does not disappear in favour of the other (unlike a conventional mass-produced novel, where the book form, and even the page itself, is fully intended to disappear behind the story narrative).
Retellings are key to Melhorn-Boe's work. She doesn't just rework classic fairy tales, but also relates more contemporary narratives–specifically, stories told her by friends. In Someday (a work in which the codex form is reimagined so that the spine holding pages together is transformed into a hinged cloth box that contains the work's loose pages—here, paper cut in the shape of doll dresses—within it), Melhorn-Boe retells the story of Marilyn Zimmerman's feminist reworkings and reconfigurations and of fairy tales for her daughter; tales like "The Four Little Pigs," in which the fourth pig is the sister who comes to tell her brothers that the wolf has already departed, and they are simply fearing fear itself. And in Library Book, paper artist Wendy Cain's story of moving from a rural farm into a home in the town of Cornwall near the public library, and her subsequent discovery of the Fairy Books of 19th century writer Andrew Lang is retold by Melhorn-Boe in a hardcover codex with pop-ups.
With Clarissa Lewis's story, Germangoodgirls, Melhorn-Boe makes a radical formal departure. Lewis's story, as with others Melhorn-Boe has retold, is about growing up—"growing up as Germangoodgirls," as the story is told—and concludes: But if being good means traveling through life with courage and an open heart, listening to what's needed in the world and responding without thought of personal gain, perhaps we need more fairy-tale heroines.
We don't follow this story, however, as a linear narrative progression through a codex. Here, the pages of the work are sculptural elements—tori, flat paper "doughnuts" connected together vertically, the work opening by being drawn upwards so as to unfold into a columnar shape. But Lewis's story isn't a part of the individual page-elements; rather it's written on the binding that connects the tori together. Melhorn-Boe literalizes the narrative thread by denying a distinction between the material and the semantic. We must experience them—medium and message—as one and the same. Her point is clear: stories bind us together.
Once upon a time there was a colour television. The first Superbowl wasn't all it showed; the horrors of the war in Vietnam now entered our home in full living colour. And though my family lived in a neighbourhood of American air force personnel where the conflict had very real, very immediate, and very devastating personal consequences, in the end it was television and what it showed that bound us together. In her bookworks, Lise Melhorn-Boe may have us recall and remember the formative capacities of the story, but most significantly, she shows us the power in its telling.
And its retelling.
Past Lives
Joan Murray
Written in 1998, when Joan Murray was the Director of the Robert McLaughlin Gallery, in Oshawa, for the exhibition, NOW i KNOW HOW TO BE A GOOD GiRL.*
Used with permission of Joan Murray.
*This exhibition title came from Rohja Lawrence, in response to seeing some of this work.
Memoirs of the time before you were born, written by your parents, can be enlightening. These strangers, who knew nothing of you—who lived without you—became your mother and father, but seem very different from the parents you are used to. Circumstance is partly to blame for this: the woman who preferred a solitary existance can find herself married, the man who disliked children can find himself a father. Artists who are women find a special edge to their interest in reading the journals of their mothers, especially those who had mothers who were also artists, because so many women artists of an earlier day were doomed to financial failure.
Lise Melhorn-Boe was born in 1955 in Rouyn-Noranda, a mining town in northwestern Québec. She grew up in a creative household: her mother was an abstract painter, Pauline Gillmore Meilman, who in 1954 married Kurt Melhorn, an electrical contractor, and moved north. Melhorn-Boe, the eldest of three daughters, showed artistic talent at an early age. After courses in architecture at Carleton University, she took printmaking at the University of Guelph, and from 1981 to 1984 studied for her Master of Fine Arts in Fibre at Wayne State University in Detroit. Then, with the support of her mother, who bought her first works and paid her studio rent, she hit the Toronto scene, met and married musician David Boe, and in 1990 moved to North Bay, where she lives today. At the same time, she produced a remarkably affecting body of work based on her feminist insights and a formal inventiveness, often involved with book-making. Her printed material might be in multiples or single works; but always the result reflected her delight in the handling of unpretentious materials. What counted was her touch; she maintained a finely graded technical ability with an oddly elusive sensibility that could veer, in one and the same moment, from the subtle to the boldly evocative. Through her work, she gestured with winsome irony toward the wider culture while confirming her citizenship in the little nation of art. A book, for Melhorn-Boe, could be of the widest possible application: Hairy Legs (1982, edition of 10) featured loose paper pages in the shape of life-size legs and, on the cover, a hand-spun raimie and hair stocking held closed by garters; in Marilyn's Grandma (1993), she hand-printed (on flannel pages) a story from a friend, and "illustrated" it with hair rollers and pin curlers, hair nets, baby doll pyjamas, nightgowns and pillow embroidery. The stories Melhorn-Boe likes to use are narratives from real life, her own and others' (often collected through questionnaires) as in the work she entitled Wandering Foot (Migration) (1993) in which she used the wandering foot pattern of traditional quiltmaking, sewn onto the reverse side of cloth maps of Canada. The quirky part comes on the backs of the blocks where, in ink, she wrote the stories of women who had to move because of their husbands' jobs; the blocks are attached in an erratically unfolding shape, like a well-used or torn road map.
Melhorn-Boe had long known of her mother's habit of keeping a journal; she often talked about them, saying that she was gathering information for a novel about her husband, but that she did not want to hurt his feelings so she was waiting till after his death to write it. But only after her mother's death in 1990 did she read the journals to which her mother had confided her true feelings. Melhorn-Boe began to reclaim her own life then, seeing it through her mother's eyes, in her mother's own writings. Saddest of all, were her mother's words about her life, especially about the things she was not doing, but wished that she could—painting and writing poetry and short stories. She was an unhappy housewife, and her personal narrative covered the area of unfulfilled desire. To these imaginings and laments written by her mother, Melhorn-Boe gave an appropriate form—reproductions in sheer nylon of articles of clothing her mother had worn; inside each garment, she hung a panel with a black, rubber-stamped text she had taken from her mother's account corresponding in date to the period of the dress. On the teenager's dress (around 1940), for instance, she wrote, "I wanted to go to art school but my father said, 'Foolishness! You'll never be able to earn your living that way.'"
As with any everyday object taken out of context, these garments, hung in a line, carry a suggestion of human life, not least because they serve as body surrogates. The words shift and waver, gathering shadows, and where the fabric folds, giving a moiré effect, they overlap, playing on top of one another. Through the eight parts of Ghost Costumes: Pauline, Melhorn-Boe records the evidence rather than washing it away, almost as though the words had become a from of progressive memory.
The work of Melhorn-Boe has been interpreted through highly publicized lenses, including that of feminist theoretical analysis. Surely its power stems from its evocation of absense and the losses that accompany memory; it recalls our own mortality, our sadness at the finite nature of our parents' lives, and the unknown ghosts at whose bidding we live. Ghost Costumes: Pauline and her other bookworks marry the personal and the political, and give meaningful expression to the disenchantments of married life.
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Harvesting Environmental Justice: The Bookworks of Lise Melhorn-Boe
by Heather Saunders
Telling and Retelling: Some Remarks on the Bookworks of Lise Melhorn-Boe
by Gil McElroy
Past Lives
by Joan Murray
Creative Meaning-making
by Tara Hyland
by Carolyn Langill
Fairy Tales and Family Fables
by Tara Hyland-Russell
Sometimes You've Got to Wake Up the Frog
by Tara Hyland-Russell
Creative Meaning-making: Reading the Bookworks of Lise Melhorn-Boe
Tara Hyland
Written by Tara Hyland in 1998. Published in the Journal of Artists' Books, JAB 11, Spring 1999.
Tara Hyland-Russell is V.P. Academic and Dean, as well as Assistant Professor of English and Co-ordianator of Liberal Studies, at St. Mary's University College. She holds a Joint H.B.A. from the University of Waterloo, an M.A. from Wilfrid Laurier University and a Ph.D. from the University of Calgary.
Used with permission of Dr. Hyland-Russell.
Lise Melhorn-Boe is a contemporary Canadian artist who produces what she terms bookworks: original meldings of textiles, texts, and the book form. Produced as single works or in limited editions ranging from one to 750 books per edition, Melhorn-Boe's creations use the book form to create an accessible site of interface between the voices in the text and the reader. The bookworks range in size, form, and material from round, palm-sized circlets of paper enclosed in a powder puff box (Powder Puff Pink) to large, life-size plywood cutouts of women, clothed in aprons and rubber gloves and inscribed with lime green text (Bound by Convention 2). Melhorn-Boe gathers her texts from other women through questionnaires, journals, and letters, and juxtaposes them within her work to interrogate the traditional socialization of women. A powerful theme running through much of her work is the list of "shoulds" and "should nots" which have been transmitted to generations of women through family, media, education, and religion.
One of the most prominent aspects of Melhorn-Boe's work is tension: dynamic tension in her bookworks; tension evoked between the works and the reader; and tension evoked within the reader herself. These tensions simultaneously are intensified and transformed as the texts reflect and refract images to the reader in a process that has the potential to disrupt patriarchal discourses and to initiate new dialogues for women. As I explored Melhorn-Boe's work, I became aware of these multiple tensions and of their dynamic interaction. I was reminded of Teresa de Lauretis' notion of a consciousness of self as a "particular configuration of subjectivity, or subjective limits, produced at the intersection of meaning and experience".1 De Lauretis deliberately uses the term "consciousness of self" to imply a fluid, continuous process of development and change, rather than the term "identity" which implies stasis and stability. De Lauretis' conceptualization of the process of self as a result of the conjunction of meaning and experience became a helpful way to understand Melhorn-Boe's works as producing sites in which the reader is positioned to question her own process of self-consciousness in relation to the voices of the women in the text. Melhorn-Boe's configuration of contradictory voices juxtaposed within works that challenge art and text forms places the reader in a matrix where various meanings and experience collide, creating new models for individual women and for communities of women.
Melhorn-Boe crosses the boundaries of bookmaker, writer, and sculptor, causing, in the words of one reviewer, a categorical crisis for the cataloguers at the National Library of Canada.2 These works can also cause the reader to stumble over the genre of these works. Yet, even putting aside the question of category and genre, (for, after all, why must we slot a work into a particular hole?) these works are still troubling. How does one read these works? As art, as literature, as multi-media installation, or as all three? As a student of literature, at first my attention is drawn to textual representations, although not to the exclusion of the non-textual. But in these pieces the form, the materials, and the iconic elements are integral to an understanding of the work. In the process of learning how to read these works, I discovered many levels of tension—tensions created through the process of reading and tensions inherent in the works themselves.
September 23, 1997: Special Collections, MacKimmie Library, The University of Calgary: Today in class we made a "field trip" to Special Collections at the university. The librarian had spread out an assortment of archival materials on the tables around the room. After an introduction to the services of special collections, we were invited to look at the materials—small press journals, rare manuscripts, diaries, correspondence, broadsheets… We weren't quite sure even how to handle some of the materials. They were bulky and big, some of them, awkward to turn the leaves, yet beautiful. Somehow the words seemed more important than they might have if they were in, say, a Norton's Anthology. They accrued some rarity, simply by being in Special Collections. Some of the paper was stunning—ragged edges, thick and luxurious. Why can't all books be so beautiful? One grouping caught my eye. Something called "bookworks", text printed or photocopied on a reproduction of a corset and then rolled up in a long, thin box; oval sheets of paper in a box made of a cast of the artist's face. And the artist/writer—Lise Melhorn-Boe—I know her name. These works are calling me. Inviting me.
Linda Hutcheon, in her discussion of postmodern forms, says, "[a] postmodern artist or writer is in the position of a philosopher: the text he writes, the work he produces are not in principle governed by pre-established rules, and they cannot be judged according to a determining judgment, by applying familiar categories to the text or to the work. Those rules and categories are what the work of art itself is looking for".3 Melhorn-Boe is a quintessential postmodern artist—blending art and text forms, refusing to reduce her works to a single meaning, opening the meaning-making of texts to the reader. The first task of a reader coming to Melhorn-Boe's works is learning how to read them.
October 9, 1997: I'm back in Special Collections looking at Lise's bookworks. I've picked "Colour Me Dutiful" to examine first because I want to see and touch the face on the box. It was in a glass display case the last time I was here and I couldn't get very close to it. I couldn't see what was in the box. The librarian brings me the piece and a pair of white cotton gloves. I can't help but wonder what Lise would make of this, as I turn the pages carefully, aware of the conservationist nature of my use of the gloves, feeling separated from the work and its real purpose. Purpose? What purpose? Here I am, hardly into this work and I'm looking for a purpose, a statement, maybe even a political agenda. Why? Is it because the work evokes that response in me or is it because I want to find a deep meaning, because I have been taught to read that way?
Colour Me Dutiful is a small handmade oval box, the cover of which is a cast of the artist's face. Inside, text is printed on face-shaped peach rag papers to resemble makeup: black letters outline eyebrows, blue letters the eyeshadow, pink the blush and red a bow-shaped mouth. The flattened iconic representation of a feminine face, with empty eyes rimmed in eyeliner, coupled with a cupid's mouth cheerily outlined in red, creates the impression of a vacuous feminine form. Conditioned to read in certain ways, I look for patterns to understand this text. Because of the configuration of the words, split along the vertical axis of the page, I start to read the text as if it were in stanzas. I begin to read down the left side of the page:
This does not make much sense. I begin to read across the page, conscious of the textual lacunae between the left-hand facial features and those on the right. Feeling like I am deliberately reading across the grain, I mentally leap over the breaks in the mid-line of the face and read the text from left to right. The syntactical slippage caused through the textual gap and through broken words—"start. ed"; "encourag- ed"—creates an effect of stuttering, and a sense of alienation between the words and the social discourses of family, school, and peers they represent. The effect is to distance the text from its anchoring conventions, thus opening a small gap for the reader to question those underlying conventions.
At first reading, I read page one as written by a single voice, the artist's I assume. It only becomes apparent after several pages that the text represents voices of various women with different stories to tell about their initiation into the world of makeup:
"I STARTED IN GRADE 11, I WORE VERY LITTLE THEN AND I'M NOT EVEN SURE MY PARENTS NOTICED" (p.3);
"MY HANDS SLIPPED IT ON MY FACE WHEN MY EYES WERE CLOSED" (p.5);
"I STARTED IN MY EARLY 20'S. I NEVER WANTED TO. MY MOTHER ALWAYS WANTED ME TO BE MORE 'FEMININE' " (p.5).
The contradictory voices within the same page and between pages jostle against one another, creating a tension within the work, unmediated by any regulatory narrative voice, a tension that implies an on-going dialogue between the various voices. Melhorn-Boe uses a similar collaborative, dialogic model in many of her works in a deliberate attempt to create new forms for women's voices which break traditional, patriarchal models of both text/book forms and art forms.
… as I read these women's stories I feel impelled to tell my own. Is it the tone of camaraderie, of shared language of resistance?… but not all the women are resisting. Some have bought into the traditional structure. Not that there's anything wrong with wearing dresses or makeup or carrying a purse but, to do those things unthinkingly, unknowingly…is that what the text is trying to say, that we need to think about how we act and dress and why?
The collaborative, multi-voiced approach Melhorn-Boe uses exerts a strong presence in much feminist art. Melhorn-Boe says: "I'm not big on theories, but the feminist art movement has certainly affected me and inspired me".5 In their examination of the American feminist art movement that began in the 1970's, Norma Broude and Mary Garrard examine the collaborative model which many feminist artists choose as a vehicle for their work. Quoting another art commentator, Broude and Garrard assert the deliberate choice of a collaborative model as a feminist art form: "Lucy Lippard has argued that feminist art replaced the modernist "egotistical monologue" with a dialogue—between art and society, between artist and audience, between women artists of the present and those of the past—and with collaboration as a creative mode".6 The collaborative mode which Melhorn-Boe uses is inherently dialogic, creating a multitude of conversations between voices of women in the text, between text and reader, and between reader and social discourses.
In much of the text in Colour Me Dutiful, the women's language signifies a rite of passage, welcome or unwelcome, and a place of initiation into the world of "femininity." Colour me Dutiful presents texts from women who were reluctant to wear makeup ("THINK HOW CLOSE LIPSTICK GETS TO YOUR MOUTH"); women who could hardly wait until they were allowed to try makeup ("I USED TO PUT ON MY COUSIN'S WHITE LIPSTICK"); women who did not wait until makeup was sanctioned by parents ("I PUT ON… LIPSTICK, ONLY AFTER I GOT TO SCHOOL"); women who felt makeup revealed their personality ("I LOOK POLISHED"); and women who felt makeup covered up their true self ("I USE IT TO COVER ME AND HIDE THE REAL ME SO I CAN FACE THE WORLD"). All of the women represented, however, talked about their use or non-use of makeup in relation to societal norms and expectations, measuring themselves against what they perceive as accepted standards of behaviour.
A related bookwork, Suitable for Success, also examines women's body image in a public sphere. A tall, thin book, (shape reinforcing content) Suitable for Success melds text drawn from John T. Molloy's influential The Dress for Success Book,7 photographs of female models from fashion magazines, and stories from women about their experiences with dress. Women's stories and photos are presented by Melhorn-Boe in ironic counterpoint to Molloy's prescriptive suggestions. The first page features a side profile of a pouting woman with long hair, open suit jacket displaying her bra, and thumb hooked in skirt waist to show her navel. Molloy's rule which heads this page and runs into the next dictates "the jacket should be cut fu/lly enough to cover the contours of t/he bust" (1-2). The formula for success suggested by Molloy is undercut by the open sexual display of the model, a marketing display created, we remind ourselves, by the male-dominated advertising machine. Melhorn-Boe's interruption of Molloy's text at page breaks simultaneously undercuts his sartorial authority and highlights the patriarchal desires shaping media depictions of women's bodies.
Janet Wolff, in a series of essays examining women and culture, explores the relationship of women's bodies to society. Paraphrasing Mary Douglas, Wolff says "the body operates as a symbol of society across cultures, and the rituals, rules, and boundaries concerning bodily behaviour can be understood as the functioning of social rules and hierarchies".8 As Melhorn-Boe explores the rituals surrounding women's dress, makeup, hairstyles, and depilatory preferences, she renders visible the social rules and hierarchies influencing women.
I like this first page, the way the text is lettered to look like made up eyes, lips, and cheeks. Carefully, I copy down the text, noting that it's in caps, trying to reproduce it in my notes. It's not enough. It's not the same when it's just words. That flattened face staring at me, almost accusing me, asking me how I feel about makeup… I'm supposed to be asking the questions here. I'm the one doing the reading.
All these voices—at first I thought they were Lise's words, then I saw the stories contradicted each other. They must be different people speaking. As I turn the last page, I see that there is a list of women who have contributed to this text. These are their stories and their faces. I thought the pattern would change by the book's end. She used the same format for every page. I wanted her to break out of that form, use different colours, stop using pink, stop using makeup. I don't have anything against makeup, but here, reading this, I think I need to make a stand. I want the work to make a stand, not just be there. I'm putting it away. I'm not sure I like it any more.
Melhorn-Boe's form and content present a challenge to the feminist theorist. Do her representations of facets of women's daily life—what she carries in her purse (Big Black Bag), how she dresses (Suitable for Success), and what she cooks (Light and Flaky)—simply reify stereotypically patriarchal images of women or do they challenge assumptions created by a male cultural objectification of women? Feminist art theory argues that any art which examines objects implicated in women's identity formation is feminist. Broude and Garrard assert that women can escape cultural oppression by identifying "icons of their own oppression—lingerie, dollhouses, women's clothing, makeup" (p.23) and by positing all things in a woman's world "from vaginas to lipsticks… as fit matter for art" (p.25). While I agree that insight into the mechanics of oppression and impetus for change can be achieved through an exploration of objects of a woman's world, I do not believe any form of exploration is sufficient to achieve those means. Two of Melhorn-Boe's works illustrate this point: Bad Girls Good and What are little girls / boys made of?
Bad Girls Good, like Colour me Dutiful, is constructed to force the reader into an interpretative and reciprocal relationship with the work. Fashioned from lavender card stock with xeroxed text, Bad Girls Good features women's stories from their childhood. The left hand pages consist of text, while the right hand pages are images of literary characters: Anne of Green Gables, Alice in Wonderland, Harriet the Spy, Mary (of The Secret Garden), Eloise, Goldilocks, Cinderella, and Pippi Longstocking. Each page is cut into three sections; the reader may read the text as a conventional book by ignoring the separations or the reader can mix story and image sections in any configuration. The artist presents the images and text, but the reader configures the order of the reading. Melhorn-Boe deliberately arranges the work so the first imagic representation is in opposition to the last. Struwelliese, the feminine version of the German cautionary tale character Struwwelpeter, is featured on the front cover of Melhorn-Boe's book in a state of disarray. Her stockings have holes, her dress is patched, her hair is tangled, and she looks as if she is barely holding on to the puppy in her arms. The last image of the book, in sequential order, is Lieschen, Struwelliese "reformed" the artist's notes tell us. Lieschen's clothes are immaculate, a crisp pinafore protects her dress, her stockings are pulled up and her hair is brushed. A cat nestles on the floor beside her feet which are politely together, unlike the first Struwelliese who stands with feet indiscreetly splayed. The title Bad Girls Good mirrors the narrative movement in the book from a "bad" girl to a "good" girl. What the text indicates, however, is that definitions of "bad" and "good" are social constructions, based on the assumptions that desirable feminine qualities are cleanliness, tidiness, meekness, chastity, and conformity. Being forced to be good was, in the words of one woman Melhorn-Boe quotes in the book, "a constant chafing horror." Transgressions of moral codes, from being untidy to allowing one's breasts to be touched by a boy, were "scary," "exciting," and guilt producing; these boundary crossings marked the line between a "bad" girl and a "good" girl.
When Bad Girls Good is read sequentially from front to back, the effect on the reader is one of control and constraint. The wildly angry Anne of Green Gables associated with the first text is reduced to the perfectly modeled Cinderella and then the reformed (good) Struwelliese. When the reader mixes the texts and their accompanying images, changes the order of reading the texts, and juxtaposes textual images of transgression against graphic images of constraint, the reading is much different. The reader is asked and invited to help construct the work's meaning through the physical act of configuring the sections of the book. When the reader inserts herself into the meaning-making process, she challenges the underlying patriarchal formulations defining bad girl and good girl.
I keep thinking about Lise's faces… I think the fact that I can't get them out of my mind, that I keep rearranging their texts, means that they're significant for me. There are so many different voices in the one work like the lawyer who says she only started to wear makeup when everyone at law school asked if she was dying because she was so pale. She got tired of "quashing their alarms by saying my pallor was attributable to reading little words in thick dust books under fluorescent lights in windowless rooms" (p.6). Then there's the woman who says "men are sexually aggressive toward me when I am made up. 'Make up and make out' " (p.8). Lise numbered the pages in Colour me Dutiful. She didn't in all of her works. The last page is all about women who don't wear makeup. I think that must be significant—the last page of a text leaves a powerful impression. The last voice says, "I don't like the feel of it, and actually, in an unpolitical way, I don't like the social pressure to wear it. Can't I just be myself?" (p.27). I don't mind the pink so much now because I see Lise including so many different voices that pink cannot possibly represent them all and because I see her resisting what pink historically has meant. Pinkness isn't woman isn't all of us isn't makeup… maybe I was resisting this work because I found its challenge uncomfortable?
A less successful bookwork in terms of challenging social gender constructions is What are little girls / boys made of? Traditional nursery rhymes are exhibited on accordion folded pages—pink dresses for rhymes about girls, blue shorts for those about boys. Actions, which carry different societal value depending on the gender of the agent, are juxtaposed to one another. For instance, one rhyme reads:
Tommy Trot, a man of law
Sold his bed and lay upon straw;
Sold the straw and slept on grass,
To buy his wife a looking glass.
Tommy Trot's actions are desirable and commendable, but not so Margery Daw's, who did the same thing:
See Saw Margery Daw
Sold her bed and lay on straw.
Was she not a dirty slut.
To sell her bed and lay in the dirt?
Although Melhorn-Boe juxtaposes the nursery rhymes, it is easy to miss their gender differences. The familiar, repetitive nature of the text imposed on the appropriately coloured page lulls the reader into a sense of familiarity and compliance with the rhyme. The sense of interchange between a multiplicity of positions for the reader is absent in What are little girls / boys made of? and thus the work is not able to critique the biased gender constructions of the nursery rhymes.
I have been arguing that Melhorn-Boe's bookworks open the socially gendered nature of women to scrutiny through an examination of roles, artifacts, and stories from women's lives. The means through which she encourages the reader to participate in an examination of the formation of such socially constructed values is the juxtaposition of novel art and text forms—forms which act to lever each other's meaning away from its normal, societal bound context. Her focus on women's bodies and their experiences through and with their bodies, together with her emphasis on meaning-making through language, provides a dual avenue of possibility for women. Marina Camboni, in an essay examining women's use of language and its transformational possibilities, focuses on the meaning-making of the mind as the seat of potential. The mind, writes Camboni, is the "centre of metamorphosis par excellence, where language, experience and mental images meet and transmute, opening up potential vistas, projecting the present beyond itself, revealing an infinity of possible worlds to subjects that never forget the fact that they are rooted in a woman's body".9 Melhorn-Boe keeps the bodied nature of women present to the reader. At the same time, she beguiles the reader to a site where language and the experience of the body intersect, forcing the reader to examine the relationship between body and language.
Looking at Lise's bookworks, I feel like I'm holding other women in my hands. As I read their stories, I rehearse their lines and try to feel what it is like to be them. I feel like I'm looking in a mirror and instead of me I see all sorts of women—of different colours, shapes, sizes, experiences—looking back at me…
In their informative and lucid explication of Italian feminist thought, Sandra Kemp and Paolo Bono argue that one of the positive results of feminism is that, in opposition to the traditional position of women as mirrors for men, dependent on men's gaze for a sense of self, now "women have started being mirrors for one another".10 This mirroring process is central to the dynamics within Melhorn-Boe's bookworks. Because of the construction of Melhorn-Boe's bookworks, a multiplicity of positions rather than a single, unified subject position is reflected back to the reader, actively engaging the reader in an ongoing mirroring process which puts the reader in a position of tension with her own subjectivity. The reader thus is invited to interrogate her own self-conscious identity and to question her relationship to the experiences presented through Melhorn-Boe's texts in an open-ended, reflective process that does not negate or resolve the tensions within the bookworks themselves and between the bookworks and the reader, but that embodies and embraces these tensions. This movement of reflection, which ultimately includes a fractured and refracted vision of gendered constructions of woman, serves in Kemp and Bono's sense to act as a new model of individual identity or consciousness of self. Melhorn-Boe's most powerful bookworks are those that refuse to reconcile their inherent tensions, but instead render visible their tensions for the reader as a site of engagement and dialogue.
1. Theresa de Lauretis, Feminist Studies, Critical Studies (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1968) 8.
2. Gloria Hickey, "Hairy Legs Cross Boundaries", Azure (November 1986).
3. Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (New York: Routledge, 1988) 15.
4. Lise Melhorn-Boe, Colour Me Dutiful (Toronto, Transformer Press, 1986) 1.
5. Lise Melhorn-Boe, letter to the author, 24 October 1997.
6. Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard (eds), The Power of Feminist Art: The American Movement of the 1970s, History and Impact (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1994) 22.
7. John T.Molloy, Dress for Success (New York: P.H. Wyden, 1975)
8. Janet Wolff, Feminine Sentences: Essays on Women and Culture (Great Britain: Polity Press, 1990) 122.
9. Marina Camboni, "Language in the Crucible of the Mind" in the Lonely Mirror: Perspectives on Feminist Theory. Sandra Kemp and Paolo Bono (eds) (London: Routledge, 1993) 84.
10. Sandra Kemp and Paolo Bono (eds) The Lonely Mirror: Perspectives on Feminist Theory (London: Routledge, 1993) 10.
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Harvesting Environmental Justice: The Bookworks of Lise Melhorn-Boe
by Heather Saunders
Telling and Retelling: Some Remarks on the Bookworks of Lise Melhorn-Boe
by Gil McElroy
Past Lives
by Joan Murray
Creative Meaning-making
by Tara Hyland
by Carolyn Langill
Fairy Tales and Family Fables
by Tara Hyland-Russell
Sometimes You've Got to Wake Up the Frog
by Tara Hyland-Russell
Home/bodies: Thoughts on Disclosure in the Recent Work of Lise Melhorn-Boe
Caroline Langill
Written in 1999 for the exhibition entitled Ghost Costumes at the White Water Gallery.
Caroline Langill is a multidisciplinary artist and writer living in Peterborough, Ontario. For the past few years her practice has focused on the relationship between intimacy and technology. Her most recent video installation, Chimera, investigated the paradox of rural life and biotechnology. She pursued visual art studies at Ontario College of Art after completing a Science degree in Biology. She also holds an MFA and a Ph.D. from York University. Her installation work has been exhibited nationally and in the UK, and her single channel video works have been broadcast nationally. She is Dean of the Faculty of Liberal Arts and Sciences at OCAD University, Toronto.
Used with permission of Dr. Caroline Langill.
For the past two decades, Lise Melhorn-Boe has been telling tales through bookworks, quilts and clothes which formally undercut the tensions in her subjects, through gentleness and humour. Her accumulated oeuvre is one of testimony and disclosure, where her subject has been and continues to be the everyday, informed by feminism and an instinctive understanding of the business of women's lives.
Self-disclosure has always hovered in the margins of Melhorn-Boe's books, but much of her vision has been external rather than internal. The work in this exhibition is treated formally within the same structural framework as her previous work, with the form draswing the viewer into an heuristic investigation. Clark Moustakas, a clinical psychologist, describes 'heuristic research' as "a process of internal search through thich one discovers the nature and meaning of experience and develops methods and procedures for further investigation and analysis"1 Melhorn-Boe has undertaken this analysis, albeit unknowingly, and has come to the point that Clark considers to be the essence of heuristics which is, for the researcher, a "direct personal encounter with the investigated phenomenon."2 Moustakas notes that "At the heart of heuristics lies an emphasis on disclosing the self as a way of facilitating disclosure in others."3 For Melhorn-Boe, the form of the book becomes an object of investigation/contemplation quietly offering surfaces, textures and layers through which the texts are woven. The viewer is gently ushered into the position of the subject within the piece, the content of which has been painstakingly obtained through detailed questionnaires. Numerous voices are heard as they collide with each other, providing empirical evidence of the complexities of women's subjectivities.However, slowly a shift has occurred and this artist has increasingly turned the discourse inwards on herself and her immediate family. With this recent body of work, using the legacies left to her by her parents, Melhorn-Boe reveals the hidden lives of parents and children. So much of what happens in a family, as it struggles to maintain some semblance of normality, is invisible to the world. Pauline Melhorn produced a number of journals which expose a life frought with tensions about missed opportunities, at a time when the notion of the nuclear family had reached its peak. Ghost Costumes: Pauline is the first work which utilizes the journal writings. Transparent garments hang from coat hangers. Within the garments, which chronically mirror her life, moving from a child's dress to a woman's coat, hang panels inscribed with fragments of her writing, expanding the spectre of the mother into a woman with her own thwarted desires.
The companion piece to this work, Ghost Costumes: Kurt, exerts a very different presence. Again we are presented with eight garments, but unlike the former, they are not representative of a life through time, but rather a life's work. Melhorn-Boe's father was an electrical contractor. The uniforms of his work are what the artist has chosen to remake, in unbleached muslin. The contrast between the gauzy dresses and the sober muslin underscores the stasis of a nine-to-five job. There is no text associated with these clothes, only photographs. These images of substations and transformer sites inevitably let us down as they fall into a generic repository of sites of construction, which have been traditionally the territory of men. The two works work against and with each other, reminding us of the power of difference and of social conformity, and how we all live with constant compromise for the good of the many.In contrast the bookworks, Once Upon a House and The Family That Liked to Eat look at the whole family and take us back to a childhood full of middle class values. The adopted style mimics children's literature. The pop-up format exploits infantile aesthetics in order to emphasize the irony of their 'happy' lives. By utilizing this form Melhorn-Boe locates us within the environment of her childhood. This canny strategy, to subvert our adult rationality through form, opens us up to the lives of this family from the point of view of the child/adult. In Once Upon a House Melhorn-Boe speaks of her stubborn integration into a family with three children. Now she begins to tell the stories that she has so often requested from others. The psychoanalyst Theodore Reik has noted that, "By the confession we become acquainted with ourselves. It offers the best possibility for self-understanding and self acceptance."4 Melhorn-Boe has innately realized this power and has used it for others, but now she has entered into a period of self-disclosure. We can note that this motivation to confess is one which has been adopted by the culture at large. It begs a larger question of why this phenomenon is occurring at this point in time, as we all teeter on the precipice of this century. For Melhorn-Boe it seems that the death of her parents provided the catalyst. We find her disclosing not only her own yearnings about the past and her childhood, but also her mother's. Her approach to Pauline Melhorn's writings is one of respect for her mother's lack of disclosure. The journals in Ghost Costumes: Pauline are veiled. The book Soft Molasses Cookies is ingeniously constructed through pop-ups which are ghost-like representations of domestic spaces, with her mother's paintings acting as backdrops. The ghost quality of the work comes from the text which covers the white surfaces of the pop-up pages and, although clear and legible, written in pencil, it fills all the available space. Like the lives of so many women, her words become a grey haze covering the interiors of the spaces of the home. They are made visible and instantly invisible through the format of the book. As we read, we discover a narrative focussed almost solely on food. The details of Pauline Melhorn's own nourishment and her nurturing of others sweeps across the pages. The colour xerox on the cover of The Family That Liked to Eat shows her cheerily displaying a plate of mussels. It is not hard to imagine what drove her to involve herself in this subject to this extent, since we know full well that the body is a site of struggle for power within the family, but it is difficult to determine what drove her to write about it so, especially since it is clear through other writings, that she had other desires and needs outside of this ealm of food. For this writer, this is how Pauline Melhorn has maintained her secrets—although the journals are now the property of her children, she has still managed to shield herself from them, to maintain her privacy, through a very cryptic text.
The other works in this exhibition support this recent heuristic journey of self-surveilance which Melhorn-Boe has undertaken. Inevitably, these works will influence her position with respect to other women's stories now that she has revealed her own to us.
1. Moustakas, Clark, Heuristic Research, Design Methodology and Applications (Newbury Park, London, New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1990), 9.
2. Ibid, 14.
3. Ibid, 17.
4. Reik, Theodore, The Compulsion to Confess: On the Psychoanalysis of Crime and Punsihment (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Cudahy, 1945), 205.
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Past Lives
by Joan Murray
Creative Meaning-making
by Tara Hyland
by Carolyn Langill
Fairy Tales and Family Fables
by Tara Hyland-Russell
Sometimes You've Got to Wake Up the Frog
by Tara Hyland-Russell
Fairy Tales and Family Fables
Tara Hyland-Russell
Fairy Tales and Family Fables was conceived in conjunction with a multidisciplinary course, "The Changing Face of Folk and Fairy Tales," developed by Dr. Hyland-Russell at (then) St. Mary's College, Calgary, where she is now V.P. Academic and Dean and Associate Professor of English. Also Co-ordinator of Liberal Studies. (When does she sleep?) The exhibition was installed at St. Mary's College, Shawnessy Public Library and Specials Collections at MacKimmie Library, in Calgary in 2003.
Used with Dr. Hyland-Russell's permission.
Over the last 25 years, artist Lise Melhorn-Boe has been exploring the lives of her subjects through the objects and narratives that frame their experience. Juxtaposing people's stories against the domestic objects of their lives allows Melhorn-Boe to probe the connections between the material aspects of our lives and the stories we beleive about ourselves. Widely interpreting the book form, Melhorn-Boe interrogates concepts of text, book and art forms while she humourously but pointedly relates the challenges of daily life as it intersects notions of equality, gender, domestic roles, expectations and the negotiation of identity. Her bookworks have ranged from loose paper pages in the shape of life-sized legs with the cover, a hand-spun stocking, held closed by garters (Hairy Legs) to life-size plywood cutouts of women letterd with lime-green narratives of women's lives and dressed in aprons and flourescent pink rubber gloves (Bound by Convention 2).
Many of Melhorn-Boe's previous exhibitions have queried the expectations that gendered roles have placed upon women; she brings a politicised and feminist stance to her work, weaving the narratives of many women's lives to construct multiple avenues through which the reader can enter the text. Initially beginning her artistic career with autobiographical works, the artist shied away from such self-disclosure following negative reception. Perhaps responding to changing critical practice which now values the life writing discourse, Melhorn-Boe has once again begun to use the rich stories of her own life as the means through which to explore cultural narratives and practices and has expanded her oeuvre to include family fables and fairy tales that incorporate the stories of both men and women.
As Marina Warner notes, "Fairy tales often engage with issues of light and darkness—the plots represent struggles to distinguish enemies from friends, the normal and monstrous."1 Fairy Tales and Family Fables questions cultural notions of normal and monstrous renditions of life quests through reference to food, clothes, choices, independence and love. Through the exhibited works, the artist explores the familiar forms of tales in umfamiliar ways to highlight the archtypes, dynamics and tensions in family fables and coming-of-age tales. The fairy tale quest story ("Once upon a time…") shapes The Boy Who Liked to Eat and girls I have known, stories of the artist's father, who emigrated from Germany to Canada, in search not of riches but food. Images of food are central in other works too: Recipes, a compilation of anecdotes from many cooks, details the atmosphere, dynamics, food choices, and force-feeding habits of their families. Photographs interspersed with the anecdotes ground the tales in vivid evocations of real people. The Tales of the Teabags uses the relationship between the cost of teabags and the price of a bottle of beer to depict in a humourous fashion one woman's story of early married life, and The Family that Liked to Eat, presented as a three-dimensional pop-up house, requires the reader to walk around the work to read the text and view the story's "set." The light-hearted text describes the "greedy" habits of this family of five that lead to the painstaking division of a bag of cherries, counted out one by one. The gently humourous tone, however, cannot quite counteract the spatial and functional separation of the mother from the other family members: while they lounge in front of the fireplace or wait for food while seated at the table, she is off by herself preparing their repast.
Only by viewing the two linked exhibitions at St. Mary's College and Shawnessy Public Library can the reader of Melhorn-Boe's bookworks understand the nuamces and interconnections of these pieces. The tensions underlying The Family that Liked to Eat are more fully explored in Ghost Costumes: Pauline, a book/sculpture of eight life-sized reproductions of garments belonging to the artist's mother, Pauline. Struggling against cultural and familial narratives that bound her into domestic roles to the exclusion of her artistic desires, Pauline found that her journals were the only vehicle through which she could voice her quest for identity and self-expression: "I wanted to go to art school but my father said, "Foolishness! You'll never be able to earn a living that way." Only after her mother's death Lise read her mother's journals. She had reproduced sections of them within the garments: "I sold my soul for a Singer sewing machine. But it does everything except type."
While Pauline was caught in a life story that denied her the object of her quest, the characters in other works of Melhorn-Boe obtain the object of their deisire, but at what cost? In a series of pop-up books that bring together the themes of cultural myths and familial narratives, Melhorn-Boe revisits four of the most well-known and loved fairy tales of our culture and scrutinises them with an eye for their politics of gender and culture. Using images from fashion magazines, Melhorn-Boe highlights the cultural artifacts that draw us to fairy tales with their promise of never-ending happiness.
Scholars like Jack Zipes have demonstrated how active and strong folk heroines in fold tales have become transformed into weak and submissive damsels in distress, beginning with Charles Perrault's version of Cinderella and culminating in the Walt Disney film version in which a hapless young woman waits to be rescued by a man who defines her life. Melhorn-Boe deconstructs fairy tale heroines as quietly submissive and questions the agents in their oppression: high heels, corsets, beauty myths. For example, Sleeping Beauty is put to sleep by a stiletto heel rather than by a spindle, while in Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, a lipstick instead of a poisoned apple is Snow White's nemesis. In Beauty and the Beast, the heroine is seen only in fragments—legs, breasts, lips—to underscore the highly sexualised but faceless and unnamed representation of women in today's media and cultural narratives.
Cinderella: How to Make a Statement Without Saying a Word, has Cinderella gazing out from the cover of her story, implicating the viewer in the telling of her voiceless tale. The work asserts the essential relationship linking beauty, power and cultural stereotyping. As fairy tale scholar Jack Zipes asserts, "To talk about fairy tales today…one must…talk about power, violence, alienation, social conditions, child-rearing and sex roles. It is no longer possible to ignore the connection between the aesthetic components of the fairy tales, whether they be old or new, and their historical function within a socialisation process which forms taste, mores, values, and habits."2 Handmade paper, finely crafted pages and witty images beguile the reader into a close examination of Melhorn-Boe's bookworks, while prompting us to consider how beauty, power and representation collide within well-known and recasted tellings of familiar tales.
Lise Melhorn-Boe recognises that, as Mary Catherine Bateson phrases it, "Women's lives have always been grounded in the physical by the rhythms of their bodies and the giving and receiving of concrete and specific tokens of love, a ring or a teaspoon of cough syrup."3 Thus Melhorn-Boe roots her bookworks and sculptures in the everyday objects and aspects of women's lives: aprons, baby clothes, recipes, meals, houses, makeup and follows a trajectory that marks the undervalued objects of women's lives as worthy of scrutiny. The resulting works have a potent visual, tactile and narrative appeal.
Fairy Tales speak of dreams, hopes and transformations. Melhorn-Boe's works impel us to examine the fables and tales that influence the constructions of our experience and invite us to consider what kind of lives we tall when we tell our fairy tales and family fables and what are the shapes of the stories that we desire to live.
1. Warner, Marina. From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers. London: Vintage, 1994. 2. Zipes, Jack. Don't Bet on the Prince: Contemporary Feminist Fairy Tales in North America and England. New York: Routledge, Kegan and Paul, 1989. 3. Bateson, Mary Catherine. Composing a Life. Grove Press, 2001.
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Harvesting Environmental Justice: The Bookworks of Lise Melhorn-Boe
by Heather Saunders
Telling and Retelling: Some Remarks on the Bookworks of Lise Melhorn-Boe
by Gil McElroy
Past Lives
by Joan Murray
Creative Meaning-making
by Tara Hyland
by Carolyn Langill
Fairy Tales and Family Fables
by Tara Hyland-Russell
Sometimes You've Got to Wake Up the Frog
by Tara Hyland-Russell
'Sometimes You've Got to Wake Up the Frog':
Fairy Tales and Family Fables According to Lise Melhorn-Boe
Tara Hyland-Russell
Written by Dr. Hyland-Russell in 2005 for an exhibition of the same name at White Water Gallery in North Bay, Ontario in July 2005.
Dr. Hyland-Russell is V.P. Academic and Dean at St. Mary's University College in Calgary. She is also an Associate Professor of English, and Co-ordinator of Liberal Studies. She has been writing about Lise Melhorn-Boe's work for several years. Publications include: Re-Rooting: At the Junction of Identity and Form in the Canadian Long Poem. Ed. Tara Hyland-Russell. Foreword Robert Kroetsch. St. Mary's College Press, 2005 and "Creative Meaning-Making: Reading the Bookworks of Lise Melhom-Boe." JAB: Journal of Artists' Books (Spring 1999): 11-15.
Used with Dr. Hyland Russell's permission.
'What is wrong with this story?' artist Lise Melhorn-Boe seems to be asking with Fairy Tales and Family Stories, her most recent bookworks. Playing on our familiarity with the classics of the fairy tale canon —Cinderella, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, Beauty and the Beast—and of their happily-ever-after plots, Melhorn-Boe not only asks to us examine the shape and content of familiar fairy tales, but also our expectations of fairy tales and our desire to make real-life stories fit the fairy tale mode. Our cultural yearning for the fairy tale's familiar and predictably gendered romance plot makes the fairy tale a perfect vehicle for Canadian artist Lise Melhorn-Boe's satiric exploration of social mores and expectations.
Over the last 25 years, Lise Melhorn-Boe has been exploring the lives of her subjects through the objects and narratives that frame their experience. Juxtaposing people's stories against the domestic objects of their lives allows Melhorn-Boe to probe the connections between the material aspects of our lives and the stories we believe about ourselves. Widely interpreting the book form, Melhorn-Boe interrogates notions of text, book and art forms while she humorously but pointedly relates the challenges of daily life as it intersects notions of equality, gender, domestic roles, expectations and the negotiation of identity. Her bookworks have ranged from loose paper pages in the shape of life-size legs with the cover, a hand-spun stocking, held closed by garters (Hairy Legs) to life-size plywood cutouts of women lettered with lime-green narratives of women's lives and dressed in aprons and florescent pink rubber gloves (Bound By Convention 2).
Many of Melhorn-Boe's previous exhibitions have queried the role that gendered expectations have placed upon women; she brings a politicised and feminist stance to her works, weaving the narrative of many women's lives into her works to construct multiple avenues through which the reader of her works can enter the text. Initially beginning her life's work with autobiographical works, the artist shied away from such self-disclosure following negative reception. Perhaps responding to changing critical practice which now values the life writing discourse, Melhorn-Boe has once again begun to use the rich stories of her own life as the means through which to explore cultural narratives and practices and has expanded her oeuvre to include family stories and fairy tales that incorporate both men and women's stories.
As Marina Warner notes, "Fairy tales often engage with issues of light and darkness-the plots represent struggles to distinguish enemies from friends, the normal from the monstrous."1 Sometimes You've Got to Wake Up the Frog questions cultural notions of normal and monstrous renditions of fairy tale and family quests through references to clothes, choices, independence and love. Through the exhibited works, the artist explores the familiar forms of tales in unfamiliar ways to highlight the archetypes, dynamics and tensions in family fables and coming-of-age tales.
In a series of pop-up books that bring together the themes of cultural myths and familial narratives, Melhorn-Boe revisits four of the most well-known and loved fairy tales of our culture and one lesser known tale but scrutinises them with an eye for their gendered and cultural politics. Using images from fashion magazines, Melhorn-Boe highlights the cultural artifacts that draw us to fairy tales with their promise of never-ending happiness. Scholars like Jack Zipes and Jane Yolen have demonstrated how active and strong heroines in folk tales have become transformed into weak and submissive damsels in distress, beginning with Charles Perreault's version of Cinderella and culminating in the Walt Disney film version in which a hapless young woman waits to be rescued by a man who defines her life. Melhorn-Boe deconstructs fairy tale heroines as quietly submissive and questions the agents in their oppression: high heels, corsets, beauty myths. Sleeping Beauty is put to sleep by a stiletto heel, rather than by a spindle while in Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, a lipstick instead of a poisoned apple is Snow White's nemesis. In Beauty and the Beast, the heroine is seen only in fragments-legs, breasts, lips-to underscore the highly sexualised but faceless and unnamed representation of women in today's media and cultural narratives. Cinderella: How to Make A Statement Without Saying a Word, gazes out from the cover of her story, implicating the viewer in the telling of her voiceless tale and asserts the essential relationship between beauty, power and cultural stereotyping. As fairy tale scholar Jack Zipes asserts, "To talk about fairy tales today… one must… talk about power, violence, alienation, social conditions, child-rearing and sex roles. It is no longer possible to ignore the connection between the aesthetic components of the fairy tales, whether they be old or new, and their historical function within a socialisation process which forms taste, mores, values, and habits."2 With her attention to the subtle interplay of handmade paper, finely crafted pages and witty image, Melhorn-Boe beguiles the reader into a close examination of her bookworks, while prompting us to consider how beauty, power and representation collide within well-known and recasted tellings of familiar tales.
In Many-Fur, a much less familiar tale, Melhorn-Boe brings the darker side of fairy and family tales to the fore. Also known as Tattercoats or Cap O'Rushes, the story of Many-Fur recounts a daughter's flight from a King's incestuous desire to have his daughter replace his dead Queen. Melhorn-Boe's use of graphically seductive female images from contemporary magazines prevents us from dismissing this disturbing tale as 'just a fairy tale' while her revival of a bold heroine reminds us of the presence of strong female fairy tale characters in versions that have subsided from contemporary memory.
Like Many-Fur, Little House Vol. 2, a three-dimensional quilted house sculpture uses the fairy tale archetype of villain but brings the threat of the "bad men" into the reality of the family home in a collision of fairy tale and family stories. In other family stories Melhorn-Boe explores social expectations jauntily exposed against the daily fabric of real lives. The white linen and lace tablecloth of Cakestand beautifully evokes the elegant tea party of a sweet and lady-like grandmother-who caps off the event with a most indelicate fart—while the red acetate circles of Slurping bring us back to our own jello-slurping days and parental consequences for improper eating behaviour.
Why does Melhorn-Boe keep inviting connections between fairy tales and our real lives? What do Snow White and TVs have in common? Her most recent meta-fairy tales give us a clue. Library Book reminds many of us of our first journey into the world of the wonder tale as it relates a reader's delight in the Andrew Lang coloured collection of fairy tales-the crimson, olive, and yellow fairy books-and of the passage from fairy tale reading to other reading. Someday, spilling out of a quilted dress-up box, is a series of unbound and exquisitely crafted fairy tale costumery—boots, doublets, gown-interspersed with a "feminist-professor-mother" narrative of her young daughter who prefers to embrace the traditional fairy tale plot rather than rewritten alternatives with strong women characters. "My daughter," she says, "has observed the world and has noticed that the boys are in charge." Melhorn-Boe simultaneously provokes the delight of the fairy tale and subverts its cultural hold. Yet, as in all her work, Melhorn-Boe does not present us with easy dichotomous choices. Instead, she places us in the midst of a repast of stories, fables, and images and lets us read them how we may, while prompting us to consider the social and gendered underpinnings of the versions we choose to believe and know. In a piece emblematic of her entire fairy tale cycle, Melhorn Boe's Wake up The Frog unifies the many strands of fairy tale that circulate in this exhibition and assembles them in a rich bricolage of text, reader and interpretation. Wake up the Frog urges us not only to read the fairy tales and stories that inform and shape our lives, but to shake them up a bit.
You can't always stick to the same story, Lise Melhorn-Boe seems to suggest. Sometimes, you've got to Wake Up the Frog.
Tara Hyland-Russell
Assistant Professor of English
Dr. Hyland-Russell is Associate Dean of Students at St. Mary's University College in Calgary. She has been writing about Lise Melhorn-Boe's work for several years. Publications include: Re-Rooting: At the Junction of Identity and Form in the Canadian Long Poem. Ed. Tara Hyland-Russell. Foreword Robert Kroetsch. St. Mary's College Press, 2005 and "Creative Meaning-Making: Reading the Bookworks of Lise Melhorn-Boe." JAB: Journal of Artists' Books (Spring 1999): 11-15.
1. Warner, Marina. From The Beast to the Blonde. p. 420
2. Zipes, Jack. Don't Bet on the Prince. p. 2
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As 2016 draws to an end, it's only natural to get a bit nostalgic about the year that has passed. I for one have spent the last couple of days going back over old posts - it has become a bit of a tradition for me to give everything a bit of an update and a fresher feel just in time for the new year. I'm not going to ramble on too much about how ace 2016 has been for the blog, as that's all coming in a separate post talking about it being exactly one year since the rebrand. However in this post, I've taken a look over the last 365 days and 157 posts to see what's been rocking your socks. Here you will find the top 10 posts on Behind The Scent from 2016, so you can catch up before my annual Best of 2016 Beauty, Fragrance and Candle round-ups to finish off the year.
The post topping the page views list this year came courtesy of The Body Shop Drops of Light collection, which I got the chance to test out before its launch. The collection of products, of which I tried out three, is aimed at brightening and adding radiance to the skin with a strong influence from Korean skincare trends. It still gets quite a lot of views via Google search to this day!
I was really excited to work with British heritage brand Penhaligon's this year on the launch on their two new fragrances, Luna and Endymion Concentré. The brief was to create a creative piece, bringing in the classic Greek myth, and I put together a modern envisioning of the tale. The fragrances were inspired by the male and female protagonists, and Luna has become one of my favourites with its modern take on the classic English rose.
I worked with independent candle brand, William & Joseph in the spring to showcase three of their gorgeous seasonal scents: Plum & Rhubarb, Prosecco & Orange and Cucumber & Wasabi. All are wonderfully fresh and burn really well due to the soy wax. I predict great things for the brand in 2017 as they have created a subscription candle box, based on their popular line of literary-inspired scents.
2016 was the first year that I put together a Christmas Gift Guide, and whilst initially I was worried that I had left it a little too late and wouldn't have enough items for it, I was really pleased with the outcome. I decided to focus on fragrance-based products, and included a mix from brands including So...? With Attitude, Dragonfly Tea, and M&J London, who kindly provided one of their beautiful Bavarian Winter candles for one of my readers to win.
This is one of two Blogging Tips posts in this list. Inspired by behaviours and attitudes I'd seen some newer bloggers displaying, I decided to write a guide which included some useful tips for things like promoting your posts, as well as pointing out some of the things that aren't seen as appropriate, like spamming and copying. It seemed to go down really well, and it was fun to write a post that was a bit more on the helpful side.
I think this was actually a bit of an impromptu post, created as I was cleaning my makeup brushes and realising that most of them were on the more affordable end of the spectrum. In the mix is one non-drugstore offering because I simply can't do my makeup without my MAC 217, as well as brushes from RealTechniques, Nanshy and even one artist brush that has really upped my eyeliner game!
I'm not sure exactly how this post managed to be so popular, but I love me some body mists and clearly so does everyone else! Hawaiian Tropic is one of my go-to brands when it comes to sun protection and summer body care, so when I saw that they released a line of body mists this summer, I quickly jumped on the bandwagon! I picked up two out of the four, the exotic passionfruit scent Summer Dreams and my personal favourite: Hawaiian Paradise which has a bit of a Bronze Goddess-esque coconut scent. This post also contains some of my favourite images, I got really into creating bright, themed flatlays during the summer, something I'd like to do more of in 2017.
This post was one that sat in my drafts for such a long time, and I randomly decided to finish it and pop it up, just before heading for afternoon tea to celebrate blogger pal Charlotte's birthday! As the name suggests, I came up with a 64-strong list of lifestyle blog post ideas, perfect for filling the gaps in your editorial calendar. I got such great feedback from this post, and it did particularly well on Bloglovin', gaining a whopping 59 loves and 80 saves! I'd be surprised if a post could top that in 2017!
Recognise M&J London from my Christmas Gift Guide post above? You're right! I first discovered the brand early this year when they offered to send me one of their candles, and suckered in by the scent description, I chose English Summer. We decided to coincide the post with Wimbledon, as the scent really does combine the best of the British summer. It has notes of cucumber, mint, strawberries and Champagne, and it really gives off that Pimms/G&T vibe. It's so unique amongst my collection and I'm so excited to get burning it next summer!
Lastly, I come onto my final post in my list of Top 10 Most Popular, and that crown goes to my review of the Queen Tea Cosmetics Detox Box. This was a bit of a surprise hit, with a lot of the views coming from Stumbleupon. I really should get to grips with that platform in 2017! Anyway, the Detox Box is a nifty little kit with two bath tea bags and a sachet of bath milk, both with an uplifting citrus scent. I love tea, I love baths, it's a no-brainer!
Thanks so much for reading my blog during 2016!


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February 18-19 and 25-26, 2012
Practice your moves. It's time to get out on the court and put yourself on the line for the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation (JDRF). Because when you participate in Dodge for a Cause 7, you're bringing us one step closer to finding a cure for this life-altering disease.
The age limit for players has been lowered to 16 this year, so the tournament offers more fun and more excitement than ever. Get your team together. And get ready to dodge


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Indiana 2005-2011 (data entry closed)
About this project in BBA Explorer
Atlas editor John Castrale kindly sent us a copy of the dataset as a Quattro Pro file in July, 2004. Data are presented here by agreement between the atlas project, NBII, and USGS Patuxent Wildlife Research Center.
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Breeding Bird Atlas Explorer (online resource). 2020. U.S. Geological Survey Patuxent Wildlife Research Center. <Date of access>. http://www.pwrc.usgs.gov/bba. Data extracted from: Castrale, John S., Edward M. Hopkins, and Charles E. Keller, eds. 1998. Atlas of Breeding Birds of Indiana. Indianapolis, IN: Indiana Department of Natural Resources. 388pp.
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Second atlas: Indiana 2005-2011 (data entry closed)
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Page generated on: 26-Jan-2020


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The Allure of Ardgillen4:30 PM
Luscious landscapes of endless greenery is one of the things I miss most when away from Ireland. One of my favourite places to visit whenever I'm home is Ardgillen Castle in North County Dublin. The castle itself is such a stunning piece of architecture but what I love most is the area in which it majestically stands. Overlooking the Irish Sea and surrounded by beautiful, carefully crafted gardens, for me, it's a place of serenity and peace, one where I can step back and enjoy nature while taking a breather from life's hectic moments. So, I made sure to visit at least once on my trip home last month! We were on our way to Dublin Fashion Festival's Creative Quarter Fashion Show when we made a quick stop at the castle to shoot this look. I wanted something chic and put-together with a slightly more mature vibe, yet with a fresh twist. I decided on my go-to piece for comfort and effortless elegance, this amazing jumpsuit from Nasty Gal, which was a life-saver at the time because I had such a limited choice as I hadn't brought that many pieces with me on my trip! I paired that with a simple beige Zara blazer, some gold sparkly heels to glam it up a little and accessorised with my favourite cobalt blue clutch for a pop of colour. As I said, my wardrobe was very small on my visit and this was also the case with my jewellery situation! Panic alert! Haha. I wore some go-to gold hoops and luckily, I had brought this gorgeous statement necklace with me that almost has a tribal feel to it which gave the outfit a more modern twist. I kept my make-up neutral but added some red lipstick for that extra boost of confidence and I was ready to go! :) What do you guys think of this outfit? I felt so relaxed in it so it was perfect for the evening ahead of me. The event itself was so much fun and it was so lovely catching up with my blogger pals Ciara and Laura, who you should definitely check out :)
I have also got some new projects in the pipeline so make sure to stay tuned! I'm pretty nervous and excited about one in particular as it's a little something different for me but I'm hoping you guys will love it! Stay updated...
xoxo, Hannah
4 comments
happy w/e ♥ ♡ ♥ ♡
Do you want to follow each other on instagram? I'm @chicstreetchoc! Thank uuu
you're amazing!ReplyDelete
very beautiful look
I like the outfits.ReplyDelete
very pretty!!ReplyDelete
I really appreciate you taking the time to comment, it means a lot. I really enjoy reading what you all have to say :-)


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Julie grew up as one of seven children in the northwest suburbs of Chicago. Her parents did a fantastic job of instilling an unbeatable determination in her. She was always an athlete, spending hours a day in the gymnastics gym. In high school, she was captain of her high school team which won the Illinois State Championship. Through academic scholarships, grants, and teaching as a Professor's Assistant, she was able to put herself through college at the University of Illinois. She graduated with honors in 1998 with a degree in Biology.
Andy grew up in the town next door with his parents and his older sister. His mom and dad knew they had to get him into sports right away or his energy might kill them all! He found soccer at the age of 5, and never looked back. Soccer allowed him to graduate from Northwestern University in 1998 with a degree in Communications.
Andy and Julie became best friends in high school while she was a cheerleader for his soccer team. They started dating their senior year, and stayed together during college by becoming way too familiar with the I-57 from Chicago to Champaign. After they got married in 1999, Julie paused her Medical School dream when Andy was invited to play soccer professionally. Seven years later, they had enjoyed soccer adventures in Chicago, Germany, Indianapolis, and Charlotte. While Andy messed around on soccer fields around the world, Julie worked as a Medical Researcher at Loyola University in Chicago, a Research Biologist at Eli Lilly in Indianapolis, and as an Adoption Coordinator at Christian Adoption Services in Charlotte. Andy spent his free time working as a Personal Trainer and teaching martial arts as a third-degree black belt.
When they started their family, it was finally time for Andy to get a "real job!" Andy, Julie, their not-quite one year old son, and their two boxer dogs drove across the country and started over in Phoenix. Andy became a cop with the Phoenix PD, and spent most of his seven years there on the Tactical Response Unit as part of a pro-active street crimes squad. He also spent a lot of time teaching as one of the head Subject Matter Experts for all the police departments in Arizona. During these years, the little "McDermott Clan" grew to six- two boys and two girls joined the adventure. And then in 2010, Will Ferrell came to town… They filmed a movie in Scottsdale called "Everything Must Go." Andy's modeling agent sent him to audition for a role playing a cop- and soon enough Andy was spending the day with Will working on a big movie set. Safe to say, he caught the bug- after a lifetime of dreaming about the movies, being in front of the camera made him feel alive in a way that he never had before.
After getting a few more opportunities, selling their house and disregarding all sense of logic, the McDermotts took a huge leap of faith and moved to Los Angeles. Little did they know this decision would require "superhuman" resilience unlike anything they had ever experienced. They have grown closer (especially in their 708 sq. ft apartment) and have simplified their daily routine to include just the most basic necessities. Join them on this journey and who knows, you may even be inspired to make some changes for your family.


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Gene Autry was an American performer who gained fame as a singing cowboy on the radio, in movies, and on television for more than three decades beginning in the early 1930s.
We offer an exciting selection of Gene Autry cap guns, comic books, toys and more. See our inventory below.