MELISSA CHALKER

PREVIOUS EXHIBITION:

‘INTERIOR DRAMA’
14TH OF JUNE - 7TH OF JULY 2018

There is a playfulness to Melissa Chalker's practice that explores the relationship between the dialogue of presentation and representation, rationality and objectivity, with intuition and uncertainty. A dialogue that goes behind the surface of the work and invades the internal structure, from front to back, and inside out. 

The transformative power of materiality is at play in these works, with the clear vinyl presenting and representing transparency literally and conceptually. Each work is an engagement between the materials by which this difference is displayed, as well as between the artwork and the architecture in which it is exhibited. The interior surfaces, the transparent windows and so on engage the viewer in an interior drama—leading to a way of explaining what is hidden: the border between the knowledge of painting and the obscurities that lie "beneath" its surface. In the artist’s own words, her work “yields the secret space of painting, exposing the obscurities that lie beneath."  The exhibition draws attention to the space between, over and under. The surface and the submerged, the interior and exterior.

ARTIST BIOGRAPHY:

Melissa Chalker was born in Sydney, Australia in 1988. The artist graduated from Sydney College of the Arts with a Master of Fine Arts in 2018 and received her BA Hons in Fine Arts from the National Art School in 2010. The artist has previously exhibited at FirstDraft, The Hole NYC, Sydney Non- Objective Gallery, Melbourne University, This Is Not Art (TINA), Articulate Projects, SCA DedSpace and Lilac City. The artist currently lives and works in Sydney, Australia.