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A portal can be a large entrance, a grand and imposing doorway, or a futuristic passageway to another world. Besides being an opening to new places, portals can also serve as openings to new experiences and sensations. Maryland Federation of Art (MFA) asked artists to share their interpretations of portals – whether literal or metaphorical, and to share their artistic perspectives and representations of the concept of portals as they see it. Entry was open to all artists residing internationally. All original 2D or 3D artwork in any media was eligible for this online show. Works selected by the juror will be on display in MFA’s online gallery, Curve Gallery, from June 15 – July 31, 2023. Exhibition Chairs: Richard Niewerth, Wil Scott.
Professor of Painting and Drawing at Illinois State University, Normal, IL
Melissa Oresky’s art practice is rooted in painting and collage, and her primary production is mixed media works on canvas and paper. Oresky is interested in landscape, and considers it as a concept that bridges painting, lived experience, environmental consciousness, and imagination. Working fluidly between abstraction and representation, past work has focused on aspects of or locations within landscape, including glaciers, deserts, formal gardens, mineral structures, the colors of daylight, and the kinesthetic experience of viewing the ground or the sky while moving. Her current work is focused broadly on plants. While looking at plants as direct subject matter for artworks, she also enacts what could be considered a plantlike process in the studio by “growing” paintings or collages through iterative processes over long periods of time. Her studio activities follow other aspects of plant being such as reflecting, filtering, and absorbing light to produce color and creating and reacting to material, atmospheric, and spatial conditions. Oresky often takes over a year to complete a piece, while working on many ongoing pieces in the studio at once. She wants her work to convey the aliveness of plants, which humans tend to regard as objects rather than fully living organisms. Oresky has shown her work in painting, collage, and video nationally and internationally, with recent shows at Boundary Space, Chicago; Tripod Space Project, Busan, South Korea; Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago; Elmhurst Art Museum, Elmhurst, IL; Minnesota State University, Mankato, MN; and K. Imperial Fine Art, San Francisco. She also co-organized and participated in the project Collage Office, an experimental, charitable platform for artists to make work for visitors by appointment at The Franklin, Chicago. Oresky holds a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago. She has attended residencies including Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Maine and The Santa Fe Art Institute, New Mexico. Originally from Maryland, she lives and works in Normal, Illinois where she is a Professor of Painting and Drawing at Illinois State University. Learn more and see her work at melissaoresky.com.
Coming soon.