Hi, this is Melissa Furness and the title of my piece in Art of the State is "Every Cloud has a silver lining." This piece is part of a body of work that I produced which detects compilations of objects commonly used within the history of painting as a critique of the traditional western cannon of art. So I extracted common elements from their original source and repainted them by their original method in oil as a collective pile, kind of like rubbish or trash, to visually discard as cliche rather than to individially revere.
This is really re-enforced by my choice of title, which also stems from well-known historical idioms or proverbs, which are essentially short sayings that have become common in general public use, and stay in sort of general truth if there is one or can be one. With this partiicular piece the common elements are clouds which can be seen on cathedral ceilings throughout the western world from the 815 through the 18th century. It is this time frame within visual arts that was essentially called a canon, which is a word derived from ancient greek which means measuring rod or standard. I collected repeated motifs of what was considered beautiful or oppulent in visual art during the time of the canon and then placed similar elements together in a collective pile of repeated objects, which in essence desentitizes the viewer and point out their banal common visuality. So I isolate the piles through the use of a gradient, kind of digital looking empty background, which I produce with an airbrush as a contrast to the highly rendered oil painting.
This points further to their on going repetition, not just as visial motifs of their time, but also carried on through history to today through constant reproduction and also digital duplication. This result is a kind of public brainwashing of what we are supposed to think of as the so called best painting of this time period. In light of present day society we see how really incorrect this visial historical precedence is. My goal is to produce these works as beautiful, but also odd, a kind of floating mass that may cause the viewer to question their understanding of the past.