About
Mel Reese was born in 1991 in Livingston, NJ. She received her B.S. from Skidmore College in 2013. During that time she studied at Studio Art Centers International (SACI) in Florence. She completed an artist residency at Elsewhere Studios in 2013 and went on to receive a Post-Baccalaureate certificate from San Francisco Art Institute in 2014. Mel received her MFA in Fine Arts from the School of Visual Arts (SVA) in NYC in May 2017 and attended the Vermont Studio Center residency in November 2017.
Mel has had solo exhibitions at R&D Studios Bushwood and Suzette LaValle in Brooklyn, NY. She has also shown in several selected group and juried exhibitions including All Kinds of Wonder and Connection at The Gallery at the Watershed in Eugene, Oregon; Post-Appreciation at the Diego Rivera Gallery at San Francisco Art Institute; Remember Me Offline at the Curatorial Practices Department at SVA in Manhattan; Play Me A Game at the Skybridge Gallery at Eugene Lang College; Breach at Rabbit Hole Studio in Dumbo; Girls Gone Wild Spring Break Edition at R&D Studios Bushwood; Cognitive Dissidence at Ray Smith Studio; The Map is Not the Territory at the Brooklyn Pfizer Building; the 58th Long Island Artist Exhibition at the Art League of Long Island; and Unicode at SVA Flatiron Gallery in Chelsea, NY. Melanie’s work has been published in New American Paintings Northeast Issue 134, Inside Artists, Artwork Archive Blog, Vellum Magazine, KINDLAND, and Wallhop.
Statement
I am an observational artist who paints abstractly. I create minimalist paintings by layering lines and organic forms on canvas. I am observing my surroundings, wherever I may be––developing whimsical impressions of abstracted landscapes.
Paint is applied in sweeping gestures—tracing the movements of my body. These forms are both accentuated and complemented by delicate drawn lines that are applied with Caran D’ache. Both the forms and drawn lines are meant to consciously interact with the frame of the painting, so that the edge of the canvas itself becomes a line demarcating the limits of the work. The result is a tension between the sharper geometric edge of the canvas and the smoother organic forms that interact with it. This tension, along with the organic gestures of the forms and lines speaks to the moments I am observing, the constant relationship between rigid urban architecture and the endless persistence of nature.