Melissa Oresky’s SOLO exhibition Tangled Grounds highlights the Chicago artist’s most recent collection of paintings and collages. Incorporating painted paper, cut canvas, and black and white photographs, Oresky’s work exists between categories of landscape and abstraction. It draws on her familiarity with a range of diverse natural environments, including recent experiences of northern New Mexico, formal gardens in Germany, the forests and coast of Maine, and Maryland.
The work in Tangled Grounds places scientific and illustrative fragments of pictures alongside liquid, painterly marks and geometric forms. The manner in which the paintings are organized suggests landscape as experienced from a human perspective—that of a walker looking at the ground, seeing crisscrossing roots, branches, wet and dry elements, and the light raking over of these tactile and structural buildups. Oresky likens her placement of these items to debris, “I am interested in the way debris tends to self-organize, and the way the tactile and the structural coexist on the ground.”
Tangled Grounds is grouped into two sections: smaller scale, self contained works that explore unique color relationships; and large scale paintings hung on brown walls, relating the literal ground outside to the background of the painting. In these horizon-less, immersive landscapes, Oresky plays with perspective and suggests multiple, simultaneous spaces, creating tension and invoking a style that relates to both surrealism and cubism.
Oresky has had solo exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art’s 12 x12: New Artists, New Work; the Riverside Art Center; Van Harrison Gallery, NY; and ADA Gallery, Richmond, Va. Recent group exhibitions include the Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art; OQBO Gallery, Berlin; the Engine Room, Massey University, Wellington, NZ; and Fountain Studios and Soloway Gallery, Brooklyn. She is Associate Professor of Art at Illinois State University, and a visiting artist lecturer at several national institutions. Oresky received a Masters of Fine Arts at the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2000 and a Bachelors of Fine Arts at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1996.
Please join us for the opening reception Friday, January 14, 2011 at 6:30 pm.
Want to learn more? Check out our programs below:
Be the Artist: Melissa Oresky- Wednesday, January 19, 6:30-8 pm
Artist Talk - Saturday, March 5 at 11 am
