ARTIST BIO
Melissa Furness’ work has been most influenced by her experiences of travel, which have included artist’s residencies around the world, such as those with Jentel in Wyoming, Yaddo in New York, the Laznia Center of Contemporary Art in Poland, Shankill Castle in Ireland, Red Gate Gallery in Beijing, the Hungarian Multicultural Center outside of Budapest; and the Kala Art Institute in Berkeley. Furness has participated in numerous international exhibitions, and was invited to exhibit work at the 2016 Kochi-Muziris Biennial in Kerala, India through A.I.R. Gallery of New York. The artist was awarded a competitive fellowship to participate in the 2015 Biennial of the Americans, through which she resided in Mexico City as an Art Ambassador and exhibited a major project produced based on these experiences. She is an active member of the Artnauts Collective, through which she exhibits small works in places of contention throughout the world, including the DMZ Museum in South Korea and other locations in order to draw attention to significant political, social and historical issues. She has also been a member of A.I.R. Gallery in Brooklyn as well as Pink Progression through which she has exhibited major works that have addressed feminist and gender issues.
Through her various residency experiences, the artist has exhibited major works in Berkeley, California at the Vizivarosi and Keki Galleries and The Drawing Room HU in Budapest, Hungary and developed site specific projects in Mexico, Hungary, Ireland, the UK, Italy and China. Furness’ work has been represented in the past by galleries in New York, Seattle, Palm Springs and Zurich leading up to her current representation with K Contemporary Art and Kiechel Fine Art galleries. Her work has been featured in numerous group and solo exhibitions as well and international art fairs in Seoul, Zurich, Cologne, Los Angeles, and Aspen. She has been featured in New American Paintings, Studio Visit Magazine, SeeAllThis Magazine, Klassik Magazine International, 303 Magazine, 5280 Magazine and others. Furness received her MFA in Painting and Drawing from the University of Iowa and is currently a Professor of Art Practices and Illustration at the University of Colorado Denver.
ARTIST STATEMENT
I am an artist that treats painting as a conceptual object. Each series of work that I have produced is related through an exploration of distortions of history. The work calls into question selections of what it is it that is upheld or kept and cherished versus what is discarded or thrown out and unwanted. These elements tell a story, from what a larger public or political body chooses to show to the world versus the reality of the local and personal life of a people or individual.
Overgrowth and refuse are major themes, as I am fascinated by the way in which nature reclaims what humans build over time as well as what one discards as trash and the narrative these suggest of the life of a people, creating a confusion of reality and cultural significance. The works in this conceptual series depict compilations of objects commonly used within the history of painting, particularly in Dutch still lives, which are images that arose parallel to the birth of the world's first consumer society. I have found that 17th-century Dutch still lives offer an uncanny perspective on our own times, in which globalism and consumer culture seem to be reaching a peak.
With these works, I extract repeated elements from their original sources and recontextualized them as a collected pile, like rubbish, to visually discard as cliché rather than to individually revere. The subject matter depicts collections of items that were repeated motifs of their day, representing ideals of opulence, beauty and knowledge—consumerism and gluttony. In producing these works as ruinous rubbish, I seek to question this history and its significance in the line of time up to this day. These items become nothing more than a pile of clichés or stereotypes perpetuated by a brutal past when one recognizes the repetition, pattern and resulting propaganda of such imagery.
These piles come together on a gradient backdrop reminiscent of the media screen, freezing the pile in action in the manner of a graphic novel. This adds to the equalizing force of the “pile of stuff”, transforming the revered thing into something of a cartoon, a stylized popular image on the level of an item purchased, thumbed through and discarded just as easily as a comic book or advertisement, not to mention a social media post. These works explore consumption in multiple ways, through what we purchase both physically to use as well as what we fully ingest into ourselves and the consequences of the “trash” that is left behind for our environment to absorb, both physically and conceptually.