Plus Gallery artist Melissa Furness has paired up with fellow UCD staffer and artist Lanny DuVuono for an exhibition at Ironton Studios in the RiNo district.
Ironton Studios is pleased to announce "Persistent Terrain", a two-person exhibition featuring works by Lanny DeVuono and Melissa Furness. The exhibition will run April 13 - May 19th, 2012 with an opening reception on Friday, April 13th from 7:00 - 10:00pm. The artists will also host a gallery talk on Saturday, April 28th, beginning at 1:00pm.
In different, but complimentary ways, both Melissa Furness and Lanny DeVuono examine historical landscape imagery through a filter of multiple, contemporary realities. The results are a series of visual metaphors on human persistence and interaction within the vast spaces of history and daily life.
Lanny DeVuono has long used the landscape imagery as a near illustration for our own human nature. She says, "Whether we see nature as beautiful and pristine, devastated from war, ecological upheaval or simply from our own use, it is mapping our histories and hopes." With a nod to the odd, illusionary potential of drawing itself, DeVuono skews perspectives, near and far. Using landscape imagery as a foil, she juxtaposes scenes of natural beauty with references to history and the environment.
Melissa Furness' work explores our attraction to what man leaves behind on the landscape. It is the unknown, the fragmentary, the imperfect, and the incomplete remains of our foiled efforts that she recompletes in fantastical ways. The ruin is an open metaphor in Furness' work--real, but fragmented, suggestive of what it "might have been" and symbolic of a new kind of overpowering external/internal vastness. The alternative sublime of reconstructed histories becomes an archeological layering of new and old images and processes within the work.
Together, these two artists are re-visualizing today's landscape through multiple, symbolic elements that continually cross over one another. Air and water, land and rock, building and destruction--all are endlessly layered in a perpetual imagined present. Each artist's process also attests to this "battle" of elements as the dry graphite line is juxtaposed with the wet painted shape, the dullness of a surface contrasts with the gloss of another, the view narrows and widens, moves and remains still.
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