Description
ARTIST STATEMENT
Feminism and labor guide my work while craft occupies my hands. I’m particularly interested in how mops, feminism, craft, and labor intertwine. My obsession with industrial mops spurred a love of repeating textures, lines, and historically gendered craft processes. I started with the personal: painting self-portraits, focusing on my hair and its relationship to moppiness. Now, I want to create space for maintenance. I define maintenance as caring for oneself and one’s community, a necessity, not a frill. I offer my community moments of respite through sculpture and installation as they get lost in the repetitions and textures that the materials and I create. This is how I see my practice and my contribution to my community expanding in the coming years.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Melissa Dorn is a Milwaukee artist obsessed with industrial mop heads, feminism, and labor. Her sculpture, paintings, and installations utilize craft, pulling at threads of her history, midwesterness, and the ordinary. Select exhibitions: Fem-utility Closet, IA&A at Hillyer, Washington, DC; Fem-utility Closet, Louise Hopkins Underwood Center for the Arts; Sarah Ball Allis Art Museum, Charles Allis Art Museum; Soft Power, Minneapolis College of Art and Design; 3 Faces of Eve, 5 Points Gallery; Made in Paint, The Sam & Adele Golden Gallery; Existing in Thought, Scout Gallery; Tension in the Ordinary, James May Gallery; Mobile Home, Var Gallery; Infauxstructure, Opalka Gallery, Sage College; The Book Club: What Would We Do With Lynne Tillman, Frank Juarez Gallery; Mopping Up, Frank Juarez Gallery; The Jump Off, Urban Institute for Contemporary Art; Detroit Biennale, Museum of New Art; Wisconsin Artists Biennial, Museum of Wisconsin Art. Select collections: Saint Kate – The Arts Hotel, Northwestern Mutual, Mandel Group, UW Hospital and Clinics, Milwaukee Area Technical College. Recent residencies and awards: Ruth Arts + MIAD Grant, Villa Terrace Art Museum Artist Residency, Oxbow School of Art & Artists’ Residency, Arts@Large Artist Residency, Sam & Adele Golden Foundation for the Arts Residency. Dorn earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design (MIAD) and has been actively involved with the college since graduating. Her best role yet is teaching as an Adjunct Associate Professor in the First-Year Experience program, where she encourages her students to learn through experimentation, questioning, and collaboration.
© Melissa Dorn