Solo exhibition by Melissa Webb

MSU Union Art Gallery

August 26-October 17 | Reception: September 12, 6-8PM

My work combines the disciplines of contemporary fiber, site-specific installation, and video. Layering accumulations of handmade textiles and textures, I pair traditional processes such as crochet, immersion dyeing, and surface embellishment with projected imagery, creating immersive scenarios that viewers can visually or physically inhabit. My practice incorporates handmade textiles and decorative objects that mimic natural forms and hold untold stories of care. I archive, dissect, and recontextualize these items in what I see as a collaboration with the maker, often deceased and unknown. My process of making teases through constructs of beauty and vitality – a romantic, idealized vision of untamed nature that contrasts with humans’ fraught and destructive relationship with our home planet. I am endlessly drawn to the multitude of green hues in nature, recreating them in the dye bath to communicate a sense of growth, verdancy, and inevitable change. Through my work, I imagine a reclamation of the Earth by wildness – a less human-centered future where we learn to live and thrive in symbiosis with the natural world. 

About the Artist:

Melissa Webb is an interdisciplinary visual artist, curator, and educator. She holds an MFA in Fiber at Cranbrook Academy of Art, and a BFA in Fiber from Maryland Institute College of Art. She has presented her work at venues such as Spring Break Art Show NYC, The Shepherd in Detroit, Cranbrook Museum of Art, The Baltimore Museum of Art, CAMP Gallery Miami, Kishka Gallery NJ, and Ann Arbor Art Center. Melissa maintains a practice of mounting immersive, site-responsive installation works in historically significant architectural spaces such as the former Lee Paper Mill in Vicksburg, MI, the Frank Lloyd Wright Smith House in Bloomfield Hills, MI, Lovely Lane United Methodist Church in Baltimore, MD, and at Clermont Farm in Berryville, VA. Awards include a Kresge Arts in Detroit Gilda Award, a Cranbrook Academy of Art Director’s Fellowship, a Robert Rauschenberg Artistic Innovation & Collaboration Grant, and a Maryland State Arts Council Award for Sculpture. Melissa was born in Baltimore, Maryland, and now resides just south of Detroit in Melvindale, Michigan.