For the last 22 years, Melissa Wilkinson has served as an academic, teaching at various academic institutions and workshops throughout the country. She received her BFA in painting from Western Illinois University in 2002 then went on to receive her MFA in painting from Southern Illinois University in 2006. Her work has been featured in wide reaching publications throughout the country including three editions of New American Paintings, The Curator’s Salon, and The Manifest Drawing Annual four times. She has shown in various galleries nationally and internationally including South Korea, Canada, India, and Art Basel Miami and has won numerous awards throughout her career. She has won several fellowships and grants including the Arkansas Arts Council Fellowship in Painting in 2012, a Middle East Studies Grant to create an image archive in Israel in 2016, and a National Women in the Arts Grant to do the same at the Smithsonian in 2019. She has conducted workshops at the Arkansas Art Center, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown Mass, and the Anderson Ranch Center in Snowmass Colorado. She is represented by OnCenter Gallery in Provincetown, MA. Her work is amongst private collections throughout the country and abroad. She hikes regularly, enjoys making homemade pasta, and enjoys kitchen experiments in fermentation that sometimes fail abysmally, and is in bed by 9pm at the latest. She holds her studio and home in the lower Hudson Valley in Warwick, New York and serves as art faculty at St John Fisher University in Rochester.
Artist Statement
For my paintings, I appropriate from existing images sourced from the Hollywood golden era, late 70’s/early 80’s tomboys and heartthrobs, disco, and private Tumblr accounts. These are personas that have informed my identity and personal sense of self. I further queer these images by creating a type of reassembled painting, one that combines masculine and feminine expressions. I look to reorganize images to challenge gender performance and propose the absurdity of traditional presentations as both limited and binary. I paint these images in order to create a coveted object, one that holds hours of considerate and loving application through a painterly meditation. They are hybridized portraits that complicate both vision and expectation. I seek to explore micro-expressions, gender play, and the exploration of my coming of age as a queer person. Influenced heavily by collage and digital intervention, I create meticulous watercolor and ink wash paintings in order to investigate what it means to labor on an object in the 21st century. Watercolor provides me with a luminous material quality, which I employ ironically to challenge its historic associations with femininity, vulnerability, and subordination to oil painting.I work in water media on paper to create a vulnerable object and a tender presence through my touch.
All of my work relates to my interest in dichotomies: obscuring and revealing, attraction and repulsion, good and evil, the past and the present. Through a tediously crafted watercolor painting practice, I seek to make something strange out of the ordinary. I am deeply interested in the interaction of parts and am attracted to the tactile in an increasingly technological and dehumanized time. The romantic process of painting allows me to meditate on issues of gender, identity construction, and beauty. Though the paintings are initially conceived of using digital processes, they are made employing a purist approach to watercolor. In doing so, I endeavor to uphold these painting processes while dismantling the elitism with which they are often associated.
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