Reception: Saturday evening, September 17, 6:30 – 8:00, public invited
Gallery hours: Tuesday – Saturday 10:00 – 5:30

Melanie Parke – The Voice in Every Object

Kenise Barnes Fine Art is pleased to open the fall season with the debut exhibition of Michigan artist Melanie Parke. The exhibition is titled The Voice in Every Object, a quote taken from a Sappho fragment. It aptly reflects Parke’s idea that objects, flowers, and places bind her to a lifetime of friendships and memories. Pastoral interior settings and still life tableaus are suffused with memory, the implication of time’s passing and of longing and comfort.

The voice in each painting speaks also of the palpable pleasure of painting itself. Parke paints in broad gestures with textured open brushwork giving way to small moments, marks that seem to alight on the surfaces of patterned vases, picture frames and tablecloths. Birds and flowers populate her paintings, blurring the interior and the bucolic outside world. Parke’s composition exists in a beautiful state of flux, the elements forever deconstructing and recomposing themselves. Evoking the rich art historical tradition of pattern painters such as Bonnard and Vuillard, Parke subverts the notion of surface and ground, subject and object. Each object in her paintings takes turns asserting itself in a visual narrative of love and companionship.

Melanie Parke is a native of Indiana, and now lives in her family cottage in Michigan with her husband who is also an artist. Parke has been the recipient of numerous residencies including a two-time visiting artist at The American Academy in Rome. Parke’s work is exhibited widely throughout the United States.

Additional space in the gallery room is reserved for framed drawings and our flat files which house hundreds of unframed works on paper. We always have a wide selection of paintings, drawings, prints, monoprints, and photographs to offer collectors. We maintain an extensive lower level inventory warehouse that includes a private presentation room.

Kenise Barnes, director: [email protected]
Lani Holloway, gallery manager: [email protected]
B. Avery Syrig, sales support and admin. assistant: [email protected]