Art on Campus - Melissa Manfull
CAPS SMALL ART COLLECTION
MELISSA MANFULL
Totem (Blue Violet), 2017
Melissa Manfull
Ink on Paper Mounted on Wood, Steel Base
19.5 x 8.25 x 5.25 inches
Location: Physical Sciences Building, Foyer, First Floor
Melissa Manfull creates intricate and detailed drawing that entice viewers into a visual trance. She finds hypnotic patterns in everything from architectural renderings to game boards, but her most recent project, the Totem series, uses polished agate surfaces, the kind one might purchase at Quartzsite’s famed rock and mineral show, as source material. Found shards of agate are just the starting point, however, for an exploration of geotectonic abstraction and an investigation into related psychedelic and meditative imagery. Agate has a reticulating, recursive structure that is at once infinite and static, presenting a microcosmic fragmentation of geologic time; a looking glass that exposes the metamorphic process; a vertical mapping of a temporal experience, evidence of tumultuous events. These totemic pen and ink drawings mimic this process by reacting to the agate, recording the patterns seen and allowing exploration of those forms through chaos and structure, and then presenting those diagrammatic designs as three-dimensional objects, fetishized tools for ritualized contemplation. Referencing, among other things, the notion of Jung’s totems as disassociated parts of a fractured psyche and scattered elements of one’s identity, these agate-inspired totems also becomes a meditation device to focus on the disjointed parts of the viewer’s own mind.
Melissa Manfull received her MFA from Concordia University in Montreal, Canada and her BFA from California State University Long Beach. Her work has been exhibited in solo exhibitions at Taylor De Cordoba, Swallow Gallery, and La Tour de Babel. Select group exhibitions include “Straddling the Boundaries” and “Witty and Urbane” at the Fellows of Contemporary Art, “Gravitas” at Brand Library and Art Center, “Structure Synthesis” at Irvine Fine Art Center, and “Abstracted Visions” at Cerritos College Art Gallery.
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