Melanie Vote “Trepidations”
DFN Gallery
This event has ended.
Intimate in scale and painted in great detail with an eye for nuance, Melanie Vote culls images from fashion and news magazines combining female figures in somewhat benign settings with odd props and unusual outfits.
Anxiety seeps out of Vote’s work where gas mask clad women, cupcake baring bombshells, and devious book smart little girls cavort across interiors and landscapes. As Vote explains her "work is an attempt to use straightforward representational painting in order to explore subtle sources of tension."
In Girl with Double Headed Hare, a woman donning high fashion dress, bubble sunglasses and a pompadour ponytail shows off her hot pink bloomers while leaning down to cajole her leashed pet; the double headed hair. At once innocent and strange, the oddities surrounding this woman are riddled with contradictions exposing the "what you see at first glance is not always what you get" tone of our current times. Girl with Cupcakes is more obvious as Vote places an exploding building in the distance behind our hostess who continues to smile seductively, offering up cakes and posing provocatively. One however never knows if she is a diversion to the destruction or if she is painfully oblivious to it.
Media
Schedule
from October 02, 2008 to October 25, 2008