Melissa Furness

I am an artist that treats painting as a conceptual object. Each series of work that I have produced is related through an exploration of distortions of history. The work calls into question selections of what it is it that is upheld or kept and cherished versus what is discarded or thrown out and unwanted. These elements tell a story, from what a larger public or political body chooses to show to the world versus the reality of the local and personal life of a people or individual.

Overgrowth and refuse are major themes, as I am fascinated by the way in which nature reclaims what humans build over time as well as what one discards as trash and the narrative these suggest of the life of a people, creating a confusion of reality and cultural significance. The works in this conceptual series depict compilations of objects commonly used within the history of painting, particularly in Dutch still lives, which are images that arose parallel to the birth of the world’s first consumer society. I have found that 17th-century Dutch still lives offer an uncanny perspective on our own times, in which globalism and consumer culture seem to be reaching a peak.

With these works, I extract repeated elements from their original sources and recontextualized them as a collected pile, like rubbish, to visually discard as cliché rather than to individually revere. The subject matter depicts collections of items that were repeated motifs of their day, representing ideals of opulence, beauty and knowledge—consumerism and gluttony. In producing these works as ruinous rubbish, I seek to question this history and its significance in the line of time up to this day. These items become nothing more than a pile of clichés or stereotypes perpetuated by a brutal past when one recognizes the repetition, pattern and resulting propaganda of such imagery.

These piles come together on a gradient backdrop reminiscent of the media screen, freezing the pile in action in the manner of a graphic novel. This adds to the equalizing force of the “pile of stuff”, transforming the revered thing into something of a cartoon, a stylized popular image on the level of an item purchased, thumbed through and discarded just as easily as a comic book or advertisement, not to mention a social media post. These works explore consumption in multiple ways, through what we purchase both physically to use as well as what we fully ingest into ourselves and the consequences of the “trash” that is left behind for our environment to absorb, both physically and conceptually.