WESTERN EXHIBITIONS Melissa Oresky 2009

October 16 to November 14, 2009
MELISSA ORESKY
A Wildness of Edges
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Interview with: MELISSA ORESKY by Julia Burghi, 2009

JB: You've been traveling a lot in the past year and in our recent conversation you told me that your work is "like a sponge." Can you elaborate on how your work has evolved or changed throughout your travels?

MO: My work ultimately assimilates a range of experience and interest. It allows me to process disparate things and merge them together. I am always making connections and drawing contrasts and my studio practice allows those to play out. With this in mind, the pieces come to be about comparative ideas of landscape rather than any individual landscapes or places I have experienced. Traveling helps me to generate new spaces that are entirely constructed. I am always measuring and using information and experience I have gathered from real locations.

I have gone to 2 residencies in Northern Europe and New Mexico, and also lived for a while in NYC, spending 3 months in each place, over the past year. The contrast between Northern Germany with its mild, green, verdant landscape and Santa Fe with the dryness, high altitude, strong, clear light, vast space, pine forests, mountains, rocky landscapes and grassy desert was incredibly stimulating for me. To then follow that up by living in Brooklyn was a great shock despite the fact that I visit New York frequently. The patina of gray and grime, irregular and regular grids, and systems upon systems is much more “wild” than the other landscapes I visited.

I am sensitive to experience of different landscapes and how they shape my state of mind, understanding of how my body moves through the world, and generally, to experiences of different kinds of light, color, density, topography, etc. New places also make me aware of the places I am familiar with and of the things I tend to overlook about them.

JB: Discuss the role of the natural and formed landscapes in your work. Do they play similar or equally important roles or is there animportant distinction in how they are part of your work?

MO: I don’t think I’ve ever experienced or will ever see a totally natural landscape. There aren’t many left, if any. People have made impact directly or indirectly on all the space in the world. But the “natural” is still a useful category. I’ve been thinking about various types and degrees of designed vs. uncontrolled space through my work more in terms of garden and wilderness than in terms of natural and formed, although those are correspondent.

It’s very hard to really control a landscape. Anyone who has ever had a garden knows that. There are successes and failures, and lots and lots of weeds. A garden is a set of things that are set into motion: material “natural” processes.

My current work takes on the analogy of painting and gardening, placing myself into the role of the painter as gardener of shapes, images, and thoughts in relation to a predetermined field. There is disorientation and weediness to contend with as well as a desire to order and control.

JB: What is the role of process in your work? How does that affect the final product?

MO: I use rules and rule making as a way to open the space of my work and to generate a maximum of formal invention, play, and discovery. Rather than beginning with anything goes, which would leave me adrift and overwhelmed by too many possibilities, a set of predeterminations in the studio: material, color, mark making, and referential choices is where each body of work begins. Having a well-defined process and studio practice keeps me focused and allows the finished work to be both coherent, and improvisational. Rules are generative for me rather than reductive.

JB: What is the significance of the twin or binary nature of your paintings?

MO: Oppositions and binaries are integral thinking and working mechanisms. The tensions and differences in art works that create content, pleasure, and difficulty always come out of inherent likeness. They are nested. You would never measure, for example, “cold” against “furry.” You need 2 qualities of temperature or 2 qualities of texture for that comparison to make sense. Things get complex and interesting when you are measuring compound qualities like cold-slick against warm-furry. These opposites create experiences that expand exponentially, but are still understandable and divisible back to their original qualities.

It seemed very natural to make this body of 20 paintings in identically scaled pairs in order to let these conversations play out in an extended way. The formal oppositions are, by the way, linked to the conversations between oppositions I am thinking about in the world, like garden and wilderness, or controlled and chaotic spaces. Seemingly solid, architectural, planar spaces, and translucent, atmospheric ones, Natural, muted color, and intense, artificial color, etc.

I always wondered whether this tendency to see things in pairs and (a)symmetries is linked to the structure of the human brain and body. Space is created as a 3rd category through the brain reconciling the differential between inputs of 2 eyes. I think these logics are math that is hard wired into us. I can step back and try to analyze how and why this happens but when I am working on paintings my decisions are not so consciously guided. I trust that they make sense, trust that my intuition is logical. I make leaps and decisions however that are also inscrutable or self-contradictory. They defy and go way beyond the binary logic. These little knots are actually the things that become the most interesting for me and that make the paintings exciting.

JB: The human brain has been a subtle but important visual component of much of your work. Can you explain how this started and why?

MO:In the past I used images of the brain, eye, and nerve cells as stand ins for landscape elements, making literal the knowledge that the body and its perceptual systems are always the primary point from which you experience landscape, painting, or anything, for that matter. The designation I have given my work in the past as cognitive or mental landscape still applies to this current work, even though I have mostly removed the overt images of eye, brain and nerve cell that typified older work. In the new work those biological elements are still implied, but have merged more openly with other imagery and the work has taken on a greater degree of abstraction.

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