THE MASK OF MEDUSA
“The Medusa Complex is the operational psyche of syncretism, that which brings together not only disparate ways of perceiving and believing, but of being – that which transforms through precisely its refusal of traditional boundaries of flesh or stone, of mythology or history, of intellect or art…” Ted Hiebert, Canadian visual artist, “The Medusa Complex”.
Anastasia Kashian 
No it isn’t. That might be AN Interpretation but an Ancient Greek would have just slapped you if you’d have said that. Medusa is about the transfixiing gaze of THE WOMAN that hardens & immobilizes until SHE gives permission to approach. Think pitiful sexual metaphors here. There is such a thing as being TOO SUBTLE.
The Ancient Greeks were way too busy slapping each other. With their handbags. And the Gorgon figure/archetype both precedes their civilization, and has outlasted it, so I’ll reinterpret it any way I choose, and defend the right of anyone else to do likewise (if not To The Death, at any rate to the level of mild discomfort, maybe being a bit lame in the middle of the week, but not leprosy…) Mycaenae holds no Intellectual Copyright so far as I am aware. Anyway, the Medusa COMPLEX has zero to do with Ancient Greece at all, and everything to do with 19thc Vienna, being originally one of Freud’s less popular Spin-Offs (it was axed after the pilot episode, halfway through the first series). Which was also cobblers, and nothing to do with my own interpretation of a fairly common mythological “meme” other than drawing on the same imagery. All of which probably goes to show – nothing much really. Except that you can’t take everything at face value. Specially not Gorgons. Ha.
Actually, like most of my stuff, it’s about modes of perception. And ambiguity. The Gorgon is a Truth we cannot look on directly, because we fear the looking will destroy us. We can only know it through its reflection. So we look in a mirror. And what do we see in a mirror but our own face, or one aspect of it, however distorted? The Gorgon has no existence in external reality. The Gorgon is the personified fear of what we think we might see. There, now I’ve broken my own rule and talked about my own work. Happy now? And stay away from those Juniper Bushes…