Gallery
Address:
119 N Peoria St, Suite 2A
Chicago, IL 60622
312.480.8390
Gallery hours:
Wedensdays thru Saturdays
11am to 6pm
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October 16 to November 14, 2009
In Gallery 1
MELISSA ORESKY
A Wildness of Edges
images | press: Chicago Art Review
interview
GALLERY TALK
with MELISSA ORESKY
and closing party on
Saturday, November 14, 4pm
Melissa Oresky will debut “Rock Gardens”, a dynamic group of paintings that make an analogy between painting and gardening, combining a range of visual languages and elements within a series of small, paired canvases. The show’s title intentionally misquotes author Roderick Nash, as he describes the role of the labyrinth in a garden as a “wilderness of edges”. In her work, Oresky places herself into the role of the painter as gardener of shapes, marks, images and thoughts in a relation to a predetermined field. She contends with disorientation and weediness in her divided compositions -- compositions that seem to fold back in on themselves – as well desires for order and control.
It is this order/control vs. disorientation that gives her paintings such compelling and strange spaces, spaces that effect simultaneous experiences of overlapping volumes. Her process employs improvisation within rigid parameters, rules proving to be generative rather than reductive, that allow her paintings to have conversations between oppositions – garden/wilderness; control/chaos; opaque/translucent; natural/artificial; architectural/atmospheric.
Oresky’s paintings and drawings in the past few years have engaged a revolving set of concerns, including landscape, color, science (and science fiction), the body and cognition/perception. This new body of work, 18 paintings in identically scaled pairs, takes on a greater degree of abstraction. Each pair is driven by color (orange, red, blue, black, etc.) with one canvas more explicitly abstract (folded and divided spaces) and the other maintaining some vestiges of pictorial landscape (garden walls and organic forms).
In a recent essay for the exhibition “On Paper” at the Galhberg Gallery, writer Lori Waxman describes Oresky’s work thusly:
Conversely, in the formal spaces that inspire Oresky’s most recent work – rock beds and German show gardens – lines not only order and fragment space, they do so to the point of total disorientation. It’s almost as if the stuff of nature from which these spaces were built – pebbles and small boulders, clipped hedges and rows of annuals – finally resisted the strictures of design into which they were landscaped, rejecting the human order imposed upon them. Oresky renders this tension between the ordered and the chaotic, the human and the organic, abstractly, suggesting that it might be repressed in the gardens themselves. And she manages to implicate the viewer’s body, also in a way so distinct from how it feels to be in a formal garden, where vistas are staged and pathways clear cut.
This is Melissa Oresky’s third solo show at Western Exhibitions. Her solo exhibitions include the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL; Van Harrison Gallery, New York, NY; and ADA Gallery, Richmond, VA. Concurrent with this show at Western Exhibitions, her work can be seen in a two-person show, "Streaking", at Proof Gallery, Boston, MA, with Carrie Gundersdorf, and a group exhibition "On Paper" at the Gahlberg Gallery at the College of DuPage in Glen Ellyn, Il. Group shows include "Thinking in Color", curated by Judy Ledgerwood, Lemberg Gallery, Detroit, MI," Into the Midst", Mixture Contemporary, Houston, TX, and many others. Oresky has attended residencies in Germany (Schloss Pluschow, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern), New Mexico (Santa Fe Art Institute) and Maine (Skowhegan). In 2005 Oresky received a 2005 Illinois Arts Council Fellowship. Recent projects include "Mineral Fabric", a silkscreened artists book editioned by Kayrock Screenprinting, Brooklyn, NY and available at WesternXeditions. Oresky lives and works in Chicago and Bloomington, IL.
ALL IMAGES © WESTERN EXHIBITIONS & EACH INDIVIDUAL ARTIST