REVIEW of SECOND NATURE in NEW CITY
by Danny Orendorf
"Melissa Dean skillfully negotiates a careful balance between the fantastic and the banal in her mixed-media artworks now on view at Peter Miller Gallery. Each piece hints at something psychosexual hiding behind the gloss of our favored consumer goods—epitomized for Dean by IKEA furniture.
Dean produces her work with what seems to be a graphic or industrial designer’s sensibility (and software), heightening their allure. Silhouettes of skylines and suburban households set the scene, while wiry outline images of domestic products sprawl across many works like varicose veins.
Dean’s work could very well serve as illustrations to a modern-day “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Charlotte Perkin Gilman’s classic 1892 short story about a woman confined to a patterned-wallpaper-clad bedroom and the character’s corresponding descent into hallucination and madness.
There is something (un)usual hiding within the laser-cut paper patterns Dean has designed and applied to many of her works produced on prefabricated doors. Electrical cords snake their way into coat-of-arms looking formations for “Coveting Hearth and Home,” and kitchenware, from forks to spatulas, punctuate the rather Ryan McGuinness-like amoeba forms applied to “HILF Island”—either a clever play on the hard to pronounce names of IKEA designs or a playful addition to the growing “‘X’ I’d Like to Fuck” lexicon."
by Danny Orendorf
"Melissa Dean skillfully negotiates a careful balance between the fantastic and the banal in her mixed-media artworks now on view at Peter Miller Gallery. Each piece hints at something psychosexual hiding behind the gloss of our favored consumer goods—epitomized for Dean by IKEA furniture.
Dean produces her work with what seems to be a graphic or industrial designer’s sensibility (and software), heightening their allure. Silhouettes of skylines and suburban households set the scene, while wiry outline images of domestic products sprawl across many works like varicose veins.
Dean’s work could very well serve as illustrations to a modern-day “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Charlotte Perkin Gilman’s classic 1892 short story about a woman confined to a patterned-wallpaper-clad bedroom and the character’s corresponding descent into hallucination and madness.
There is something (un)usual hiding within the laser-cut paper patterns Dean has designed and applied to many of her works produced on prefabricated doors. Electrical cords snake their way into coat-of-arms looking formations for “Coveting Hearth and Home,” and kitchenware, from forks to spatulas, punctuate the rather Ryan McGuinness-like amoeba forms applied to “HILF Island”—either a clever play on the hard to pronounce names of IKEA designs or a playful addition to the growing “‘X’ I’d Like to Fuck” lexicon."
REVIEW of SECOND NATURE in FLAVORPILL
by Karsten Lund
"Like the 'viral components of consumer desire' she hopes to underscore, the familiar forms of domestic objects are omnipresent but elusive in Melissa Dean's works at Peter Miller Gallery. In small inkjet prints and larger compositions of enamel and paper on pre-fab doors, Dean creates overgrown jungles of lines by layering the miniaturized contours of chandeliers, vacuum cleaners, and assorted furniture. Combining these tangled webs with ornamental patterns and colored silhouettes on the verge of abstraction, Dean furtively lets the figurative content in her depictions of accumulation fall prey to decorative form. Her works may reflect on so-called commodity culture, but as objects of easy visual enjoyment, they also allude to their place within it."
by Karsten Lund
"Like the 'viral components of consumer desire' she hopes to underscore, the familiar forms of domestic objects are omnipresent but elusive in Melissa Dean's works at Peter Miller Gallery. In small inkjet prints and larger compositions of enamel and paper on pre-fab doors, Dean creates overgrown jungles of lines by layering the miniaturized contours of chandeliers, vacuum cleaners, and assorted furniture. Combining these tangled webs with ornamental patterns and colored silhouettes on the verge of abstraction, Dean furtively lets the figurative content in her depictions of accumulation fall prey to decorative form. Her works may reflect on so-called commodity culture, but as objects of easy visual enjoyment, they also allude to their place within it."
SECOND NATURE at PETER MILLER GALLERY
artist's reception:
December 5, 5-8 pm
Peter Miller Gallery
118 N. Peoria, 3rd Floor, Chicago
About the show:
A collection of new work, including large works on prefab wooden doors, painted digital prints, and installations made of Ikea catalogs and cardboard, Dean continues her conversation about consumerism, decoration, form and desire for her second solo show at Peter Miller Gallery. The show runs from December 5 to January 31.
ARTIST STATEMENT
There is a text by Marcuse which supposes that commodity culture creates "a second nature of man which ties him libidinally and aggressively to the commodity form." In this view, culture bleeds into nature, and we find ourselves afflicted with a biological need that has been constructed for us rather than wired into us. This body of work engages with these viral components of consumer desire through infectious patterns, indexical marks, and ghosted objects. In refashioning mass-produced materials, I seek to forge a space amid the overgrowth, a domesticated space in which one can assess and reflect on the informational glut of our commodified world.
