12/09/2025
A big thank you to Michael Ryan for his beautiful review of "The Golden Hair of Medusa," published in Parenthesis 49, the Fine Press Book Association Journal. At the conclusion of his Review entitled, "When Looks Can Kill," he writes:
"The Golden Hair of Medusa" is thus a remarkable work
which exists on several different levels. It provokes and
challenges. It invites us to consider what may be really going
on in this tale. Above all, it demonstrates what a mature
artists’ book can be, utilizing text and artifact to create a
complex integrated whole. But this is what we expect from
Mindy Belloff, an artist whose body of work never lets the
viewer off easily. While Hawthorne intended his volume for
children, Medusa metamorphoses it into something
altogether different.
Above all, "Medusa" the book subverts Medusa the myth. In
its sheer beauty, its drama, its subtleties, and its powerful
creativity, it completely reframes the myth as a magnificent
piece of art to behold, rather than turn away from. We can
look at Medusa in the last pages of the book and behold not
a monster, but the beautiful girl blessed by the gods that she
once was. To look at this Medusa is to marvel and admire,
not die. To behold Medusa here is to live and learn. Like
Nathaniel Hawthorne, Belloff herself has reconceived the
myth, and in doing so has rehabilitated it for a 21st-century
sensibility. We must hope that the artist continues her
journey through the bequest of remote antiquity in future
work.
