“Queer as a $3 bill” was a saying Melissa Wilkinson’s mom would say while she was growing up. Wilkinson reclaimed the saying for one of her first art pieces of this type, a collection of paintings of spliced images of old Hollywood queer icons.
The series — “Three Dollar Icons” — included celebrities who were not necessarily gay but had made progress for LGBTQ+ communities, including Rob Hudson, Judy Garland and Bette Davis.
Wilkinson talked through her latest art exhibition being shown Feb. 10 at Gallery 406 in Arts West. About 50 spectators watched as Wilkinson described her inspiration for “Queens and Monsters,” which features celebrities, roller skates and classic ’80s motifs. The exhibition will be displayed in Gallery 406 in Arts West until March 13.
The exhibition is made up of a few collections, including “Flash Cocotte,” “Queens and Monsters” and “Chimera.” The exhibition looks at gendered gaze, noting how the surveyors are typically masculine and the surveyed is feminine. Wilkinson said she wanted to change the dichotomy in this work.
“We see it everyday, and its origins are in art,” Wilkinson said.
Wilkinson kept her own experiences in mind as she worked on displaying the gendered gaze. She said she can feel when people look only at her feminine presenting wife because that is what they are more comfortable with.
In this collection, Wilkinson used photos — mostly of celebrities — and spliced it in Photoshop. She then traces the work and paints using watercolors — sometimes using 10 to 12 layers of paint in a square inch.
“It's a labor of love, but it's ultimately luminescent because of the inherent transparency of watercolor,” Wilkinson said.
“Three Dollar Icons” was the beginning of Wilkinson’s experiment with this type of art, leaning out of the comfort zone. In her collegiate art training, Wilkinson was taught that painting based on images was “cheating” and said it took a while to untrain herself from that notion.
Wilkinson now works as an art professor at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth, and has been displayed at galleries across the country and internationally.
Wilkinson’s works are inspired by Greco-Roman sculptures, as well as body-building magazine Physique Pictorial from the ’80s — which aren’t as different as they may seem.
“Ultimately, queer culture has not changed,” Wilkinson said. “I picked up on that, and I choose to focus on what it means to be a gay woman who paints.”
Freshman Margo Pegram said she thought the context of the paintings made the exhibit.
“I like the feminist roots of her work,” Pegram said. “If you look at it and it's really interesting, and then you hear her talk about it, there's such a story behind her work.”
Junior Justin Allen said this was the first Elon exhibition he can remember based on LGBTQ+ communities.
“As an art student, I'm so caught up in the technique and the skills that it's hard to put meaning to art,” Allen said. “But I think she's just given me hope, essentially that the skill and the technique will come along and then eventually you'll get comfortable with it, and then you'll be able to focus on what matters, which is the meaning and that, I think, is the main subject.”