The Ground Has Thoughts

 This is artist Melissa Furness, and this section of the show contains both my newest and my oldest piece. In the exhibition on the large main wall is an 18 foot long triptych that I've been working on over the past year, and is something of a culmination of my thoughts leading up to this point and is a stepping stone to what I hope to create next.

Within this painting are pieces of borrowed history from still life paintings, fantastical fairy like figures from far off lands and historical pattern motifs, along with weeds and gnarled trees compiled to form an epic battle scene on an ever-changing dinner table. It is reflective of the current political chaos of the, of the present day, and with its title, A Revolution is Not Dinner Table speaks to the complexity of our current social interactions amongst a population that has become decisively at odds with one another. The current political climate in the United States is marked by low trust in institutions, high levels of polarization, and a growing sense of unease among the public. It is truly a table of unease.

So in front of the large painting is another new work, which is a collaboration between myself and composer Sam McGuire. So this piece is called Transversal and speaks to roads traveled in directions that are not so straight. The are meandering and complex and led by the heart to places that are both known and unknown. The audio composition is a mixture of a sampled heartbeat, synthesized music, and sounds captured at ancient castle ruins in the Czech Republic. The runtime is 41 minutes and runs on a loop and the paintings attached to the speakers are oil paint on aluminum and are ordinary weeds from the yard transformed into creatures. In the center is a circular panel with cast rubber leaves leading the journey to somewhere that is both familiar and not. The two sidewalls contain works created with unusual materials: moss, fur, stenciled, spray paint, resin, vacuum, foreign plastic, and oil paint. So these pieces utilize textures and patterns to create a physicality of the present in an an embedded past.

So these lead into the back wall, which is painted black and has two moss oval ovals, flanking a large resin coated painting. The ovals are depictions of actual historical paintings, which I have covered with moss leaving certain areas open that are hand gestures and body parts, which point towards a revised meaning of an original, idealized epic narrative. The pieces change into a private depiction of human sexuality, which is at the heart of the human history.

The central piece is one that I created while I was still in graduate school, but which was the beginning of a train of thought in all of my previous work up till now. So there are two cartoonist figures situated in a historical bathhouse inspired by one of my first artist residencies abroad to Budapest, Hungary. The work began with the idea of thinking of myself as a foreign body. And these baths were the place where I felt myself to be the most foreign living in a place for a time, as I attempted to be part of a culture and to know these people. I did not speak the language, though, and so perceived of these people as something like cartoon characters perhaps spouting a fantastical narrative for me to interpret. So as a result, I painted the environment for these figures entirely separately and encased in resin with the figures, like stickers sit placed on top and symbolic of my inability to truly know and understand them. So at this time I was also fascinated with silent films and early film noir, and so you see the darkened corners which replicate the lighting of these early films. My intent was also to create a painting that appeared to have light glowing from within, like a light box rather than reflected off of it. And the piece was inspired by my last day in Hungary when I walked down a hallway and saw a series of light boxes depicting the various historical baths located throughout the city as advertisements.

So this exhibition has provided me with a rare opportunity to present the full breadth of my creative work, which is based on a questioning of an epic past and a self-aware present day. The work explores how we live amongst the ruins of history and the ways that an often misperceived past has become embedded in an ever-changing present. With this, I enjoy this old oldest work of mine facing my most current work, and I'm curious as to how they speak to one another within my own history.