Maybaum Gallery is pleased to present Throw Open The Windows, its first show with gallery artist Melanie Daniel. In Melanie Daniels’ work, immersive landscapes, full of surreal nature, reveal to the viewer psychedelic and intricately woven futuristic details. Electric colors uncover a buzzing visual ecosystem exploring the interaction between a subject and its environment. Dwellers of a rich natural world are found attached to their phones or immersed in virtual reality or journeying side by side with one another toward an unknown destination. Contrastingly, flowers and plants threaten to overrun the canvas. This beautifully rich natural world and its dwellers reveal to the viewer a cultural environment not much unlike our own. It is in this dichotomy that Daniel reveals a cautionary yet hopeful way of looking at and experiencing a world marked by never-ending possibilities of technology.
Melanie’s work in the exhibition draws heavily from the Canadian landscape and her great appetite for the history and language of painting, the landscapes are interjected with areas of delicate stains and washes contrasted with passages of abstract impasto and intricate patterns.
“I’ve always painted landscapes populated by ghostly or camouflaged people that shift in and out of existence. Growing up in western Canada with its vast wilderness has completely influenced the way I see the world. Although much of my work has a narrative streak, I’ve never been one to align myself with dominant trends or fashions. But something powerful is happening all over the world – people are starting to notice the terrible imbalance we’ve established with the natural world. Somehow, the subject of mother earth and sensual nature has become central in my work. I paint futuristic landscapes that take on a dreamlike quality in which the figures quietly lose themselves in mutated forests or gardens.” — Melanie Daniel
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