Melissa Pokorny’s new work explores literal and metaphorical attachments, in a sort of call-and-response between people, places and things. In these imagined spaces, where collections of diverse elements meet, “stuff happens” through an expanded sense of connectedness.

Things that are meant to prop, hold, attach, or support are rendered useless (or made useful) through uncertain applications within these relational geographies. A sense of absence prevails throughout, emphasized by situations that elicit a sense of loss—of losing one’s way, the loss of memory to time and distance, of losing one’s mind, or the loss of self. People go missing, and things get left behind.

Melissa Pokorny lives and works in Urbana-Champaign, Illinois, where she is an Associate Professor in Painting and Sculpture at the University of Illinois. Shows at Platform Gallery in Seattle and Front Room Gallery in New York augment a long career of solo exhibitions. Select group exhibitions include New Langton Arts, Southern Exposure, Victoria Room and Yerba Buena Gardens in San Francisco; Foodhouse Gallery in Los Angeles; Columbia College, devening projects + editions, Gallery 400 and The James Hotel in Chicago; and The Richard Peeler Art Center at Depauw University in Greencastle, Indiana. Her work is held in collections on the west coast at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, the Richard L. Nelson Museum at UC Davis, Orange County Museum of Art and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, as well as at the Richard Peeler Art Center at Depauw University.