Cascadia 4

By Melisa Taylor

In Melisa’s optical and pulsating compositions, the natural world acts as blue-print while she explores the notion of the sublime through blur and precision. The artist develops an aesthetic of duality by hybridizing divergent approaches to art. Her studio practice is labor-intensive; various instruments and electric tools are used out-of-context to inject unpredictability in the painting gesture. Melisa has assimilated to her visual language an eclectic multilayering process combining hand-made stencilling, airbrushing, pyrography and staining on wood. Mechanical-like execution and arbitrariness converge to create what she calls "systèmes faillibles" whereby painstakingly applied layers are potentially defaced by one single final intervention. A resulting subterranean tension is generated that jeopardizes the ethereal aspect of her imagery populated by spectral motifs that simultaneously emerge and recede through an obscuring lattice. Melisa Taylor's vibrant geometric abstractions evoke human-scaled simulacra of screens that attempt to capture the vertiginous amount of incoming data and distractions contemporary humans experience on a daily basis in this era of “hyper-connectivity”, all the while attempting to temper the “noise” to induce a contemplative experience.