Melissa Wilkinson
Melissa Wilkinson received her BFA from Western Illinois University and her MFA in painting from Southern Illinois University. Her work focuses primarily on the body and gender expression as her subject.
She says: “I appropriate from existing images sourced from disco, private Tumblr accounts, the Hollywood golden era and late 70s/early 80s ‘tomboys’ that have informed my identity and personal sense of self. I further queer these images by creating a type of reassembled painting, one that combines the masculine and the feminine. I look to reorganise images to play with gender and challenge the tropes of heterosexuality. I paint these images in order to create a coveted object, one that holds hours of considerate and loving application through a painterly meditation. I seek to explore micro-expressions, gender play, and the exploration of my coming of age as a queer person. Influenced heavily by glitch art and data moshing, I create meticulous watercolour and ink-wash paintings in order to investigate the line that is straddled by abstraction and representation. I work in water media on paper to create a vulnerable object and a tender presence through my touch.”