Embedded

a mid-career retrospective
First Floor Galleries: June 5 – August 24, 2025

Galleries Hours : Mon – Fri, 11 am – 7 pm
Sat 10 am – 4 pm
Sun 12 pm – 4 pm

Arvada Center for the Arts & Humanities

6901 Wadsworth Blvd.

Arvada, CO 8003

720-898-7251

Website: https://arvadacenter.org/galleries

Conceptual artist and painter Melissa Furness explores a complex past as embedded within the present, drawing from experiences of place and site, and of the tradition of painting and narrative. Treating painting as a conceptual object, her work examines distortions of history, questioning what is revered versus what is discarded and forgotten. Her work highlights both narratives shaped by power structures and the individual—what is presented as truth versus the realities of personal and local histories. Amongst all of this is a depiction of struggle affected by history as expressed in ways that are responsive to the human experience.

The artists' works will span across six galleries, each with a conceptual focus: Grotesque Nature, In Ruins, History and Gluttony, What Stones are Good For, Gathering Moss, and The Ground Has Thoughts.

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Serving Gluttony 

Essay by Catherine Flood
April 2024

“Food is the point where our bodies merge with the vast universe outside, and that’s scary.” – Ruby Tandoh, Eat Up! (2018)

https://unitlondon.com/2024-04-05/catherine-flood-on-serving-gluttony/

Eating blurs the boundaries between us and the world. It is where politics converge with pleasure and social ideas are inscribed on bodies; where ecologies intermingle with our biology, and our appetites shape landscapes. What we eat and how is an intimate matter of personal habits, memories and gut reactions, but also a subject deeply implicated now in concerns over environmental crises and social inequalities. These intersections make food a compelling lens for contemporary art. Serving Gluttony brings together seven artists who all explore aspects of our modern industrial food lives, and the complex histories they represent, in ways that are at once profoundly personal and urgently global. 

Voyage Denver Interview

May 2024

https://voyagedenver.com/interview/check-out-melissa-furnesss-story/

Today, we’d like to introduce you to Melissa Furness. Hi Melissa, so excited to have you on the platform. So before we get into questions about your work life, maybe you can bring our readers up to speed on your story and how you got to where you are today.