Event Advisory: Melinda Steffy at Finlandia University Art Gallery

"Remnants & Residual Memories"
January 11 to February 11, 2010
Artist reception Thursday, January 21, 7:00-8:30 p.m.
Finlandia University Art Gallery, 601 Quincy Street, Hancock, MI

Philadelphia artist Melinda Steffy's current painting/textile/objects draw from her interests in memory, mythology, alchemy, geology, family history, and music. Based on the belief that materials retain meaning from their previous uses, items like antique lace, the spice turmeric, tarnished copper, dead ladybugs, and found barrettes make their way into rhythmic visual compositions that consider questions of memory, the loss of memory, and the construction of systems that sustain memory.

"Eyes on the Earth" exhibition at George School

"The Seventh Day" and "Three Thousand Daughters" (2008) are part of George School's exhibition "Eyes on the Earth: Sustainability Through the Eyes of Artists." On display October 12 through November 26, 2009.

Third prize in annual Faber Birren Color Award Show

"Song for the Morning" (2008) was awarded third prize in the 29th annual Faber Birren Color Award Show, hosted by the Stamford Art Association and juried by MoMA curator Paulina Pobocha. Show runs October 4 through November 5, 2009.


Article in Greenwich Time
Article in The Hour

Melinda Steffy in The Philadelphia Inqurier

The Inquirer's Victoria Donohoe did a brief write-up of my show at Villanova University (Friday, September 4, 2009). Online here.

Excerpt:
"...there's a luxury of sensation and touch combined with intricate adjustments of single shapes or separate smaller objects ... in her seemingly casual reveries with dyed cloth, I sense what might be the rare giftedness of a phenomenal quilt maker."

Transmute IV - 4.5"x4.5" (10"x10" framed) copper, liver of sulfur

Ode: Hestia Travels

approx. 84"x60"

360 pieces of burned paper, sewn together

Installation shots at Villanova University Art Gallery

A few images of my show "Remnants and Residual Memories," on display at Villanova University Art Gallery through October 4, 2009.

Melinda Steffy in Delaware Arts Info blog

The Delaware Arts Info blog mentions both of my current shows in a post about Wilmington's August 14 openings: "More Artful Excitement in August" by Jessica Graae (Sunday, August 16, 2009).

Excerpt:
"...the marriage of music and art is a vibrant one. How wonderful to think a student or teacher might pause after a cello lesson to look at Sequence I-III..."

Melinda Steffy featured in Art on the Town brochure

I am the featured artist in this month's "Art on the Town" brochure, produced by the city of Wilmington, DE. See page 2 for my bio and page 7 for show information.

Press Release: Melinda Steffy at Villanova University Art Gallery

"Remnants and Residual Memories"
August 21 - October 4, 2009
Artist reception Friday, September 11 from 5-7 pm
Villanova University Art Gallery, 800 Lancaster Avenue, Connelly Center, 2nd Floor, Villanova, PA 19085
http://artgallery.villanova.edu

For Immediate Release
For more information, contact Maryanne Erwin at 610-519-4612

Villanova, PA – Contemporary artist Melinda Steffy draws inspiration for her art from many sources, a recent one being the curious behavior of some penguins depicted in a documentary about Antarctica. In it, a flock of penguins is seen heading for the open water. On the way, part of the group turns back toward their nesting ground. Joining neither group, one lone bird chooses a third direction, waddling off toward distant mountains.

“I’m intrigued that these few birds set out on a solitary journey that goes against all penguin food, flock and mating survival instincts,” says the Philadelphia artist, whose thematic installation, ‘Remnants and Residual Memories’, opens August 17 at the Villanova University Art Gallery. “This anomaly fits with my ongoing interest in order versus chaos, structure against formlessness, while adding, at least seemingly, an element of free will.

For her upcoming Villanova exhibit, the artist is creating what she calls “a ‘memory room’ of painting/textile/objects” through which she seeks “to metaphorically reclaim memories before they disappear.” The work includes found objects, remnants, secondhand fabrics, family keepsakes, hand-made pigments, and house paints.

"I like the word ‘remnants’, says Steffy. “They’re fragments that you’re rescuing from a former life. What they were used for in that previous life is somehow being carried through. It’s not the end of the story.”

A free public reception to meet the artist will take place Friday, September 11, from 5 to 7 pm, in the art gallery on the Villanova campus. The exhibit, which is supported in part by the Pennsylvania Partners in the Arts, the regional arts funding partnership of the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, continues to October 3.

The exhibit is, in part, a look into the nature of her grandfather’s memory loss from Alzheimer’s disease. “While there was distortion and fading of material memory, abstractions of life seemed to still be there for him. He might not have specific memories, but he could recall the qualities of a person,” she notes. More broadly, Steffy sees her Villanova installation as comprising “rhythmic visual compositions that address abstract questions about memory and its loss, particles and the void around them, structure and formlessness, purpose and accident.”

Normally a backdrop in traditional installations, the gallery walls play an integral role in Steffy’s exhibits. “The most compelling installations cluster the artwork in groups and pay careful attention to the wall space between so that there is a feeling of breath and emptiness as well as connection and interrelation. The pieces themselves are deliberately fragmentary, brief, to give the feeling of a nearly forgotten story or a fleeting line of music,” says the artist, for whom music plays a central role in her art and life.

The materials of which the objects are made are as integral to the art as the objects themselves. “For me,” says Steffy, “untraditional or re-used materials carry with them meaning from their previous lives or original purposes, and so add conceptual complexity to artwork.” She cites as an example the house paint in her work ‘Remark’. Peeled from its surface, rather than attached to a wall, with a painstaking grid of unraveled canvas threads, the paint was cut into rough shapes and then loosely sewn together. “All of the house paint I use is left over from other people’s renovation projects, so it carries a connotation of home life and transformation, rather than the blankness of commercial artist paints.”

Other compositions include ‘Fable (Loss and Its Recovery)’, with more than 300 found barrettes on individual paper pieces stitched together by the artist; ‘Fugue (Grandmother’s Favorite)’, featuring ink drawings on paper hand made from 80-year-old sheet music, and ‘Aubade (Mnemosyne Sings)’, comprising nine five-foot-square canvas panels dyed vibrant yellow with turmeric.

To enhance the material meaning, Steffy makes her own dyes and pigments from plants, nuts and spices, which often have medicinal properties or applications beyond their common uses. The tediousness of the paint-making process, as with the stitching, sewing, papermaking, and other repetitive tasks, invests her even more deeply in her art. “The repetition and the monotony, even though I may cringe at them, become ritual and rhythm. They make me part of the meaning of my work and add elements of time and spirituality”

Steffy received her Master of Fine Arts degree in painting in 2006 from the University of the Arts in Philadelphia and earned a bachelor’s degree in religious studies at Eastern Mennonite University in Harrisonburg, Virginia. She has given bead-working classes for small business ventures in South Africa and studied Mayan back-strap loom weaving in Guatemala. Her work has been exhibited at the Sam Quinn, Rosenwald-Wolf, F.U.E.L. Collection, and Highwire Galleries in Philadelphia, William Paterson University, MicroMuseum, The Music School of Delaware, the Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts, and the Lancaster Museum of Art. Her mural, ‘In Remembrance’, hangs in the Tshwane Leadership Foundation in Pretoria, South Africa.

The Villanova University Art Gallery is open weekdays from 9 am to 5 pm. For weekend and extended hours, and other information, telephone the Art Gallery at (610) 519-4612. Selected works for Melinda Steffy’s exhibit may be previewed on the gallery’s website at http://artgallery.villanova.edu.

Event Advisory: Melinda Steffy at The Music School of Delaware

"Vegetable/Mineral"
July 13 - September 14, 2009
Artist reception Friday, August 14 from 5-8 pm
The Music School of Delaware, 4101 Washington Street, Wilmington, DE 19802.

Featuring, mixed media paintings and 2-D metal works, Melinda Steffy’s artwork pulls in themes of geology, alchemy, entropy, molecular structure and improvisation, addressing broad questions of structure and formlessness, purpose and accident. Her experimental uses of materials create fluid, abstract forms with subtle patterns and unusual textures.

(10% of sales will be donated to the Music School.)

Fugue: Grandmother's Favorite

12"x12"

handmade paper from 80-year-old sheet music, ink, canvas

Aubade: Mnemosyne Sings

9 panels each 60"x60"

turmeric-dyed canvas, torn apart and roughly sewn together; 144 squares per panel

Introductions II: Venus Receives

9 panels each 4"x4"

copper tarnished with liver of sulfur

Untitled (Solitary)

52"x52"

walnut stain, recycled paintings, latex house paint, canvas

Translation

14"x14"

antique lace dipped in latex house paint

Remark

35"x35"

latex house paint embedded with unraveled canvas threads

Residue I: Horizon

23"x35"

burnt sheet metal, ash; the residue from "Ode: Hestia Travels"

Introductions I: Mars Enters

9 panels each 4"x4"

rusted iron filings on canvas

Fable: Loss and Its Recovery

dimensions variable

over 300 found barrettes, paper, thread

NURTUREart - artist registry

See my artwork in NURTUREart's artist registry.

Eileen Neff at Locks Gallery

Published by The Bulletin on March 5, 2009. Online here.

Levels of Reality, Unreality
By Melinda Steffy

Eileen Neff’s current show at Locks Gallery, “Things counter, original, spare,” creates a still, silent space in which perceptions of reality and originality are subtly twisted and distorted. The large-scale photographs, along with a smaller diptych and a narrow vertical line of abstracted color, occupy a spectrum that considers various states of existence and gently blurs boundaries between what is real and what is unreal.

On one end of the spectrum are photographs of scenes that presumably actually exist somewhere in the world. “Under the Summer Sky” shows a dilapidated zoo enclosure in which the surrounding forest has reclaimed the wooden beams and wire mesh. Instead of housing animals, the pen now holds tree branches and shrubs with a distorted sense of what is outside/inside, of which is the container and which is being contained. “Two Deer” juxtaposes a photograph of a real deer standing attentive in a clearing next to a photograph of a fake deer (and its black bear companion) lazily propped against the side of a cabin. And although it’s likely that “A Goat in the Field,” depicting an inquisitive-looking white goat standing in Ms. Neff’s signature forest-enclosed green field, is a digital composite, the resulting image is plausible — faintly bizarre, but an image one might actually see.

Moving along the spectrum are montages of images of real scenes, combined for abstraction and visual complement. In “Before and Behind” a different zoo pen image has been inserted over the same field image, rectangle on top of rectangle, so that various forces of openness, containment and space exist simultaneously. It brings out different degrees of human control (mown field, wire cage) versus natural growth (forest around field, trees filling cage). Another piece, “Horizon,” takes a photograph of dense, barren tree trunks and places it next to a thin vertical stripe with a sky-blue top and grass green bottom. The stripe grounds an otherwise horizon-less view of a winter forest and adds a heightened perception of distance, without any of the horizontality usually associated with landscapes.

Another segment of the show splices together images of images of real scenes so as to appear believable, but to actually distort reality. By using a photograph of the bare gallery wall as a backdrop for inserting photographs of her other pieces, Ms. Neff twists the viewer’s sense of originality, creating an artwork of her own artwork. The gallery itself and then Ms. Neff’s representation of the gallery emerge as active, intertwined elements, while the original scenes, being twice removed from their concrete existence in the world, become abstracted. In “After the Winter Before,” it looks like “Under the Summer Sky” has been propped against a wall next to the wall-mounted vertical stripe of “Flipping Glimpse” (the same stripe from “Horizon,” this time isolated against the white gallery wall) and an already hung “A Goat in the Field.” The faux installation-view pulls together the visual relationships of the three pieces and opens a window to an alternate-universe viewing possibility.

In a similar piece, “The Winter Before,” Ms. Neff includes an image of a piece not present elsewhere in the show, taking the distortion of reality a step further. Sandwiched between the edges of “Two Deer” and “Horizon” sits an image of a picture of blurred branches rushing past. Given the stillness and location-specificity of all of the other images in the show, this one moment of decontextualized movement stands out — it is both present in its activity and absent in its lack of place. It exists as an image of a photograph, but doesn’t actually exist in photographic form in the show. It is as if the viewer can only see it secondhand, through someone else’s lens, which raises the question of whether it physically exists at all. In the age of digital creativity and virtual community, Ms. Neff engages her nature-themed artwork in a conversation about what is really real and suggests that perhaps reality isn’t what we expect.

Current Shows at ICA

Published by The Bulletin on March 4, 2009. Online here.

Ten Tactile (But Not Touchable) Things To See At ICA
By Melinda Steffy

In case super-slick technology and mass-produced products make you crave a little human touch, swing by the Institute of Contemporary Art and take your fill of finger marks, hand-lettered signs and claymation-esque film.

Three concurrent shows — “Dirt on Delight: Impulses That Form Clay,” “Touch Sensitive: Anthony Campuzano” and “Joshua Mosley: dread” — maintain a magnetic sense of tactility, making visible the work of the artists’ hands. The delightful variability and irregularity that comes with hand-creating objects emerges in the diverse assortment of works that range from functional teapots to abstract sculptural vessels to illegible bulletin board posts. (Unfortunately, the fourth ICA show, the ramp project “Third Space” by Odili Donald Odita, while vibrant and soaring, seems far too impersonal and stylized in relation to the other shows and, therefore, curatorially out-of-place.) Below are descriptions of 10 particularly eye-catching and tactile pieces, in no particular order.

No. 1: “Shinnecock Pots” by Beverly Semmes. The surface of the meter-high vessels shows every evidence of human hands — grooves where fingers pushed and pulled the wet clay, smudges and smears. Ms. Semmes often adds extra handles, their superfluity suggesting the spaces where many hands could grasp. Then, as if to offset the overstated human presence, she paints the vessels the brightest fluorescent red, a thoroughly artificial color, smacking of neon lights and food coloring.

No 2: “Red River” by Peter Voulkos. Clay has never seemed heavier, denser, more clay-like. The tower of roughly formed blocks contains none of a vessel’s lightness, no openness. The solid mass bears down upon itself with unglazed surfaces, the plain clay bearing scratch marks and indentations with rough smears of glaze aggressively marking the facets. This is raw material, primal energy.

No. 3: “Zyko” by Ken Price. In contrast to Mr. Voulkos’s mass, Mr. Price’s minute detail occupies another extreme. His melded tubular forms — faintly figurative, but mostly cellular — have intricate surfaces that pull the viewer in to examine the whirl of colors. By applying dozens of layers of paint and then sanding the surface smooth, Mr. Price reveals delicate organic patterns so tiny they seem impossible.

No. 4: “Cenote” by Kathy Butterly. Ms. Butterly revels in dichotomies and paradoxes: a geode growing out of a pedestal, a vessel collapsing into ruin, opposite textures, complementary colors, a mysterious diving-board-like rectangle jutting into the abyss, a string of pearls. The textured moss interior perfectly challenges the slick, muscle-colored exterior while the small sculpture manages to balance vulnerability with a commanding presence.

No. 5: “Trophy Busts” including “Chemo I” and “Chemo II” by Robert Arneson. The self-portrait maquettes come across as anti-trophies in their painfully expressive distortions of Ms. Arneson’s head, commemorating loss rather than success. In “Chemo I” and “Chemo II,” the destructiveness of disease is evident in the squashed and gouged torsos, while the other figures recall emotional distress with scratched and worn surfaces.

No. 6: “Vase (Blue & Gold)” by Jane Irish. Another lover of paradox, Ms. Irish constructs pseudo-Rococo vases and urns with modern-day imagery. Instead of precise detailing, the decorative stripes and curls are obviously hand-painted with irregular edges and crooked lines. The sketchy narrative scenes within the cartouches are borrowed from Vietnam-era antiwar posters, showing scenes of battles and fighting soldiers, rather than traditional Rococo images of cherubs or relaxing peasants.

No. 7: “Agee Manufacturing Co. (Winter Catalogue)” by Ann Agee. The overflowing table of the artists’ “wares” takes the style of Meissen porcelain figurines but modernizes the characters and the morals. As at a store, there are multiples of many of the sculptures, but instead of having mass-produced uniformity, each repetition is unique, as though the story changes slightly each time it is told.

No. 8: “Greatest Show in the World” by Anthony Campuzano. Text-artist Mr. Campuzano avoids the regularity of a printing press in his hand-lettered drawings and paintings. The faux-stencil type in “Greatest Show” references the performance motivations of Lenny Bruce and Tiny Tim with Barnett Newman-like vertical strips of text and color. Between the strips, graphite hatchmarks further reveal the artist’s hand at work creating irregularly shaded backgrounds.

No. 9: “Gimme Shelter” by Anthony Campuzano. In another piece in Mr. Campuzano’s show, Rolling Stones lyrics are carved into the fibers of a worn red, orange and pink beach towel, the letters intersecting with the woven flowers and stripes. Handiwork meets commercial production; a message of apocalypse meets an emblem of frivolity.

No. 10: “dread” by Joshua Mosley. Before they were bronzes, the five sculptures on display were clay models, digitally scanned by the artist to create the animated figures in the six-minute film, complete with narrative soundtrack and philosophical allusions. Although technically not claymation, the film retains the feeling of hand-built characters and stop-motion movement as the figures move awkwardly, more slowly than the surrounding rustling leaves. The artist’s direct control over minute details shines through the technological process.

InLiquid page

Be sure to take a look at my InLiquid page which went up this winter: http://inliquid.com/artist/steffy_melinda/steffy.php.