Melissa Vogley Woods

Biography

Melissa Vogley Woods, born 1968, Columbus Ohio, received her BFA  in Painting from Kansas City Art institute and MFA in Printmaking from Ohio State University.

Vogley Woods is a cross-disciplinary artist focusing on notions of painting with works on canvas, sculpture and performative video.

Recent solo exhibitions have occurred at the Wexner Center for the Arts, Weston Art Gallery, Cincinnati, the Denison Museum and Raskolnikow Galerie e.V., Dresden Germany. Most recently she was one of 3 artists featured at the Columbus Museum of Art. Vogley Woods has been curated into National and International exhibitions  including; Museum of Sisters Aslamazyan in the Armenian Republic, CICA Museum, Gimpo-si, Korea, The Situation Room and Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions,  Los Angeles, California, Society for Contemporary Craft, Pittsburgh, PA, Firehouse Art Center, Longmont, CO, Delikatessenhaus Leipzig, Germany, Access Arts Detroit, MI, Sam Francis Gallery, Santa Monica, CA.

Recent honors include: Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award for Craft and Sculpture, The Greater Columbus Art Council Dresden Residency, the Greater Columbus Arts Council (GCAC)Individual Artist Award and several GCAC project support grants. Recent residencies include International Artist Residency at MASS MoCA, and the GCAC Dresden residency exchange. She has taught at various institutions including CCAD, Denison University and Kenyon College and OSU. She is an active member of the Columbus arts community as an artist-curator and Mint Collective member, with recent cuitorial projects including “Rooms to Let” Columbus I and II and III,  “Tracers” feminist exhibition, rock concerts and panel discussions and most recently she worked collaboratively for “Will Play for Space”, shown at Brooklyn Immersive by Mint Collective, Brooklyn NY.

Melissa Vogley Woods lives and works in Columbus, Ohio

Statement

I have a long standing interest in the folding landscape of time and how history is written and cemented while at the same time erased and denied.  This new work examines how messages must be communicated in secret and in code, through the abyss created by this erasure and the conflict that the erasure manifests both internally and externally.

We look to find meaning by creating hidden spaces of intimacy and compassion where author-less clues are left, messages are shared covertly—some given, some forced—and wisdom is handed down that becomes mangled or distorted­.  It is these moments and actions and what suppresses them that I point towards.  I am interested in how we attempt to find resolutions accepting some that are forged through equality, some forged out of skewed desire or imbalances.  One moment’s resolution can be another moment’s conflict, becoming a stalemate with no end.

I see my paintings as fields of time and the sculptures as still moments that are left behind — things that have fallen out of time.  My performative videos become a way to speak to internal conflict.  I have found abstraction as a way to represent the erasure and to memorialize the infinite.  I use dichotomous forms to attempt to bridge the divide of what is pulled or split in two directions– such dualistic structures as arches; both bent and straight, materials that appear real yet are fake, gendered and ambiguous figurative forms at rest or in tension.

I am working with my own language; codes and symbols that are covert, secret, performed or faked in an attempt to be intentionally mysterious. This is done in pursuit of a sort of mimicry to enact how these messages are handed down– a kind of sideways, indirect mode of communication that is slow and lingering.