Melora Kuhn
Artist Residency Season:
2013-14
Artist Name:
Melora Kuhn
Profile:
The portraits of Melora Kuhn examine issues of identity, history and personal vs. public spheres. Painting, sculpture, and installation all play a role in her exploration of classic narratives filled with stately figures and poetic interpretations of inner and outer realms.
Her work is an ongoing investigation of the human experience, within the self, and within society. Drawing from art history, fairy tales and mythology, Kuhn takes specific images and alters them accordingly, in an effort to examine patterns of thinking and ways of being. Her interest lies in what is left out or forgotten, in the deterioration of a solid form or known history, in something that appears to be one thing, but is quite another. She has a group of paintings called the Survival Series that are based on found photos with a color figure in front of a black-and-white background, usually of a disaster, representing their psychological state or imagined history. Another series involves portraits with overlay drawings of other people on the top. The effect is as if a second thought, or scene is playing itself out on the face of the person portrayed—we the viewers can read the mind of the person whose portrait is in front of us.For information about the piece she created while in residence, click here.
FIVE QUESTIONS
1. What inspires your work?
Movies, travel, books, conversations, dreams, photographs, flea markets, art history, regular history, museums, handmade things, textiles, hiking, architecture, period rooms, and other people’s work.
2. Who from art history would you most like to meet?
Edouard Manet
3. If you weren’t an artist, what would you be?
Interior designer, fashion designer, or landscape architect.
4. Tell us what you’ll be working on at Lux.
The painting I proposed for Lux is the interior of a throne room, with two stags fighting. The stags represent a pre-Christian belief system, and natural method of discovering a hierarchy, introducing a disruption into the very controlled system of the Occident.
5. What is the best book you've read recently?
The Ocean At The End Of The Lane by Neil Gaiman www.melorakuhn.net
The Ocean At The End Of The Lane by Neil Gaiman www.melorakuhn.net
Works:
Residency Piece
Melora Kuhn was in residence at Lux from November 7-December 7, 2013. During her stay, she created Locked Horns in the Throne Room, a stunning painting set in an Italian Renaissance palace. For more about the piece, click here.
Solo Exhibitions
2010
The Edge of a Surface, 16 Bungee, Seoul, Korea
2009
The Things That Disappear in the Distance, Studio as Laboratory, Germantown, NY
2007
The Unravelling Tale, Gallery Hyundai, Seoul, Korea
Shifting Measures, ZieherSmith Gallery, New York, NY
Melora Kuhn, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Brooklyn, NY
2005
The Torriento Troupe, ZieherSmith Gallery, New York, NY
2004
Rites of Passage, Chase Gallery, Boston, MA
2003
Interior Constellations, ZieherSmith Gallery, New York, NY
2002
Blackboard Exercises, The Arts Center, St. Petersburg, FL
2000
Paintings, Gallery M3, Boston, MA
1997
Recent Work, Milton Art Museum, Milton, MA
Selected Group Exhibitions
2011
Woodshed III, 100 hours in the woodshed, Gallery 51, North Adams, MA
2010
Upstate II, Nicole Fiacco Gallery, Hudson, NY
Callicoon County Affair, Organized by NADA, Callicoon, NY
Notes on Future Illusions, Gallery NAGA, Boston, MA
The Artist as Collector, Laconia Gallery, Boston, MA
2008
All of this is melting away, curated by Jay Sanders from the collection of Susan Hancock, ROYAL/T, Los Angeles, CA
2007
Citadel, David Risley Gallery, London
White Light, White Heat, Mahan Gallery, Cleveland, OH
2006
Offspring, Boston University Art Gallery, Boston, MA
Flaming June, Spanierman Modern, New York, NY
ACTIONS (3) Fivemyles Gallery, Brooklyn, NY
2005
The Finland Biennial, Aboa Vertas Museum, Turku, Finland
2004
Back to Paint, C& M Arts, New York, NY
Nuit Blanch: Lost in Translation, Ampersand Int’l Arts, SanFransisco, CA & Nuit Blanch: Lost in Translation, Hyphen, Paris France
2003
Florence Biennale, Florence Italy
Bad Touch, Rose Art Museum, Waltham, MA
New Talant, Melora Kuhn & Jessica Grace Brooks, Chase Gallery, Boston, MA
Dreamy, Zieher/Smith Gallery, New York, NY
Borrowers: Evidence of Influence, New Art Center, Newton, MA
2002
Small Works, Small Art Works Arte Contemporanea, Florence, Italy
Media to Images, Brickbottom, Somerville, MA
Open Studios Press, Selected works, Boston, MA
Bernard Toale, The Drawing project
2001
Somerville Arts Council Grant Reciepiants, Somerville Museum, Somerville, MA
Boston Artists, Winzererstr. 47e, Munich, Germany
City Guns, Boston Artists at the CAC, Contemporary Artists Center, North Adams, MA
Girls and Swirls, Paintings by Melora Kuhn and David Palmer FPAC Gallery, Boston, MA
2000
Ten Boston Artists, MPG Gallery, Boston, MA
The Virtual Circus, The Revolving Museum, Boston, MA
Star Search 2000, The New England School of Art and Design at
Suffolk University, Boston, MA
Wonder Woman and the Fantastic Four, Winzererstr. 47e, Munich, Germany
The Revolving Museum at National Boston, Boston, MA
Multiplicity in time & space, Ampersand International Arts, San Francisco, CA
1999
Manifest ‘99: A Biennial Survey of Contemporary Art
The Copley Society of Boston, Boston, MA