One Good Eye // Melissa Dunn

Sheet Cake Gallery is pleased to announce the first solo exhibition at the gallery by Melissa Dunn (Memphis, TN), One Good Eye. An opening reception will be held on Saturday, November 14 from 5 - 7:30 PM and on view through January 16, 2027, with an artist talk on Saturday, January 9, 2027 at 1 PM.

In both her artistic practice and daily life, Melissa Dunn turns toward quiet as a way of seeing. Moving through the world and her studio seeking stillness and reflection, Dunn listens for what she calls “the seer”: a faceless, formless presence that is not a deity, but the purest part of her awareness. The paintings in One Good Eye emerge in the space between this quiet inner observer and the artist’s everyday self, where attention, discernment, and intuition become acts of resistance to a world that is consistently loud, fast-paced and exacting. Abstraction creates a conduit for introspection and grounding guided by color and form, presenting the viewer with an intentional yet generous ambiguity. 

Drawing is the foundation of Dunn’s work. For more than two decades, she has maintained a daily sketchbook practice, making drawings primarily from imagination and returning to them over time as source material for her paintings. Lines and shapes made in the open range of drawing are selected, sifted, and reinterpreted in paint, where loose marks and soft blobs meet hard graphic edges; layered patterns and stacks of shapes create both spatial depth and portals of possibility. 

Across One Good Eye, energy and stillness coexist. Articulated, steady, loose, and warbling lines accumulate alongside negative spaces that invite the viewer to linger. The works ask us to slow down and pay attention: to notice the ripple effects of where we place our focus, to make room for ambiguity, and to encounter abstraction as a form of presence.