This is the artist’s New York debut.

Based in Illinois, Melissa has exhibited her work at venues such as The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Standard Gallery, Chicago, Mixture Contemporary, Houston, and Wendy Cooper Gallery, Madison, Wisconsin. Melissa is also currently featured in a solo exhibition at Western Exhibitions in Chicago. Melissa earned her MFA from the University of Illinois-Chicago, her BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and completed a residency at the prestigious Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.

Groundcover, Shapeshifter presents work from 2 parallel series of paintings. The Shapeshifters can be most simply described as blobs or tangles of imagery, repeated and built into entropic volumes. The Groundcover paintings are structured like semi-abstract landscapes with foliage made of nerves. In these works, inchoate masses of tangled lines, imagery, and fluid paint coalesce into moments of crystal clarity, like the shift from daydream to focused, conscious thought. Groundcover suggests the top layer of this thought, the lucid surface of a dense, turbulent interior proposed by the Shapeshifters. This work is positioned between interior and exterior concerns: body and landscape, science and science fiction, vernacular, illustrative picturing and the possibilities of paint.