“Openings” by Melanie Johnson
August 27, 2018 @ 8:00 am - October 12, 2018 @ 5:00 pm
About the Artist:
Melanie Johnson received her MFA in Painting from Indiana University. She is Associate Professor of Art & Design and co-coordinator of the Foundations Program at the University of Central Missouri. She lives in Kansas City.
Artist Statement:
I make large scale figurative drawings and paintings using imagery derived from observation and composite sources. Narrative is employed loosely in my work and I draw primarily on the familiar as a catalyst for making. The imagery gives form to a dissonant accrual of lived experience, family histories and anecdotes, appropriated iconography and the acting out of roles both obligatory and imagined. Surface, palimpsest and indexical histories of making are meaningful in my process. I want the physical work to encapsulate imagery representative of a lived moment as well as the history of its own manifestation. The work should conjure a habitat that has one foot in reality and the other in a state that evokes the slipperiness of memory, longing or a disquieting curiosity.
Image: Picking and Choosing (detail), Charcoal and Pastel on Stonehenge, 2012, 50″ x 42″