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