Front Room is pleased to present “Useful Things (For Getting Lost)”, a solo exhibition of new work by Melissa Pokorny. As the title suggests, this show is about looking-for things, at things, or through things. It’s about the pleasure that can be had from getting lost, as well as the anxiety that can produce in those left behind. These new photo/collage/sculptural works reveal the extraordinary beauty hidden in the guise of the quotidian. Domestic objects gleaned from estate sales are combined with photographs and casts of utilitarian things-hammers, flashlights, pin cushions and coat hooks, to create evocative tableau that blur the boundaries between the domestic sphere and the natural world, the animate and the inanimate, the magical and the mundane, and remembered or invented memories of places and things.

Melissa Pokorny’s sculptural work examines connections between “things” as potent containers of memory, capably representing loss and estrangement, and the deeply metaphorical, haunted landscape of the everyday. Drawing on traditions of assemblage, these sculptural tableau and wall mounted forms address the status of marginal objects and things. Narratives that incorporate these occulted objects allude to the allure of magical thinking, and the collapse of boundaries between the animate and inanimate.