MELANIE JELACIC : Vacation Photo Paintings

Opening Reception :
July 14th 6pm-9pm


On View :
July 14th - August 14th



We are proud to present works of Melanie Jelacic as the second of many on
going solo shows in our newly designed Art Salon: Vacation Photo Paintings.

Vacation Photo Paintings is a series of paintings made from photographs lent
from friends. The rules being: 1. Has to a vacation snap shot 2. The image
must have an animal or animal based product in a human created setting 3.
The image should be almost monochromatic. I am interested in people
continuing interest to collect uncommon images. All these images have a feel
of being wild/natural but all take place in controlled human environments.

Melanie Jelacic's Brooklyn studio is small but eyes wonder; hanging canvases
of different degrees of finish are mixed upon her collection of art, insects,
and fauna. Melanie Jelacic's sculptural and painterly environments create
an intimate correspondence between the organic and the man-made, the
zoological and the sociological, the historical and mythological, high-art and
the every-day. The effect of her work is less akin to the taxonomic order of
the contemporary sense than to the Renaissance Wunderkammer, or wonder-
cabinet, where the order of oddity prevailed and nature's anomalies were
casually but deliberately allied with the marvels of new technology. In these
quixotic private collections, select earthly artifacts were displayed together in
relationships that exposed their unlikely likeness and unexpected strangeness.
Similarly, Jelacic's materially eclectic and broadly allusive pieces function like
small, personal collections, or curated worlds; in them, familiar methods of
knowing produce newly clarifying results, and so-thought well-known objects
are endowed with a sense of interior life, at once elegantly unfathomable
and imaginatively evocative. In discussion with the artist about her art the
conversation is deeply rooted in science but always emerges to become
emotional and nonsensical. The constant pendulum between fact and fantasy
keeps her ideas in motion.

Melanie Jelacic is a long time resident of Brooklyn and her studio is presently
in Bushwick, Brooklyn. This is her first solo show. See more of her work online
at www.melaniejelacic.com


The Art Salon at Kill Devil Hill 170 Franklin St. Brooklyn NY